Bible word study

Bible Word Study: The Original Hebrew and Greek Words

The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and its great words carry more than any single English translation can hold. This is a word study drawn straight from the public-domain Strong’s dictionaries: the original word in its own script, how it sounds, what it means, and how the King James Bible translates it. Start with the great words below, or search for the one you are studying.

Why study the original words

A translation must choose one English word where the original often held several shades of meaning at once. Hebrew shalom means far more than the absence of conflict; Greek charis is a gift precisely because it cannot be earned. Studying a word in its own language does not replace reading the Bible; it sends you back to the passages with clearer eyes, closer to what the first hearers understood. No single word settles a doctrine, but each one opens a window.

The full Strong’s lexicon holds 14,197 words (8,674 Hebrew and Aramaic, 5,523 Greek). Featured here are 600 of the highest-value words, led by the great theological terms of Scripture, each on its own page.

The great words of the New Testament (Greek)

The great words of the Old Testament (Hebrew)

The lexical data on this page comes from the public-domain Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890), a Hebrew and Greek dictionary keyed to the King James Bible. It is a reference tool, not a settled verdict: no single word decides a doctrine, and meaning is finally shaped by how a word is used in its sentences. Read the passages themselves, prayerfully, and in full.