What Is Strong's Concordance?

Strong's Concordance is a reference system that assigns a unique number to every distinct Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word underlying the King James Version of the Bible. Instead of guessing at the original-language word behind an English translation, you look up the number attached to any English word in the text and go directly to the Hebrew or Greek term it translates. It remains the most widely used tool for original-language Bible study more than 130 years after its publication.

Who was James Strong, and why 1890?

James Strong (1822–1894) was a professor of biblical literature at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey. He spent over three decades compiling what he titled The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, published in 1890. The word "exhaustive" was literal: Strong and his team of assistants indexed every single occurrence of every word in the King James Version — not just significant theological terms, but every word, including common ones like "and" and "the."

Strong's core innovation was separating two jobs that earlier concordances mixed together. A concordance's first job is to list every verse where an English word occurs. Its second, much harder job is to identify which original-language word stands behind that English word in each case — because translators often render the same Hebrew or Greek word with different English words, and sometimes render different original words with the same English word. Strong solved the second problem by assigning a permanent reference number to every original-language word and printing that number next to each entry, so a reader with no Hebrew or Greek training could still trace the original word directly.

How the numbering system works

Strong's system uses two separate number ranges, one for each testament's source language family:

Every word in the Old Testament carries an "H" number; every word in the New Testament carries a "G" number. The numbers themselves don't follow alphabetical or thematic order — they were assigned roughly in the sequence Strong's team encountered and catalogued the words, so H1 is not necessarily more "important" than H8674. What matters is that each number always points to exactly the same original-language word, no matter where it appears in Scripture. Because the number is fixed, you can jump from any English word in any verse straight to its Hebrew or Greek root without needing to read Hebrew or Greek yourself.

Each Strong's entry typically includes the transliterated original word, its root or derivation, a grammatical classification (noun, verb, adjective, and so on), a definition or range of meaning, and — critically — a list of the different English words the KJV translators used to render it throughout the Bible. That last part matters more than people expect: it shows you at a glance whether a word is translated consistently or scattered across several different English renderings depending on context.

Walk-through example: "Word" in John 1:1

The clearest way to see Strong's system in action is to work through a real verse.

The English word "Word," capitalized here as a title for Christ, carries the Greek Strong's number G3056, the noun logos. In koine Greek, logos means far more than a single spoken or written word — it carries the sense of a reasoned account, a message, or an underlying rational principle that governs and explains something. Greek philosophy, particularly Stoic thought, had already used logos to describe the rational principle ordering the universe. John's Gospel takes that loaded philosophical term and applies it to Christ: the eternal, reasoning Word who was "with God" and "was God" from the beginning, and who — as John 1:14 states — "was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

Looking up G3056 in a Strong's tool shows you that logos appears roughly 330 times in the New Testament, translated most often as "word" but also as "saying," "account," "reason," "communication," and other terms depending on context. Reading through even a handful of those other occurrences — for example, Luke 4:32 ("his word was with power") or Hebrews 4:12 ("the word of God is quick, and powerful") — builds a fuller sense of the term than the single word "Word" in John 1:1 can carry on its own.

This is the entire value of Strong's Concordance in one example: an English reader with zero Greek training can see that "Word" in John 1:1 is not a generic term for speech, but a specific, philosophically loaded Greek noun that John deliberately chose to identify Christ with the eternal reasoning principle behind all creation.

Why Strong's is still the gold standard for word study

Modern Bible software and websites have produced dozens of word-study tools since 1890, yet Strong's numbering remains the backbone underneath nearly all of them, for a few concrete reasons:

• Universal compatibility. Because Strong's numbers are a fixed reference standard, almost every Bible study tool, interlinear Bible, and Hebrew or Greek dictionary published since the 20th century cross-references Strong's numbers. Learning the system once lets you use decades of subsequent scholarship.
• No language training required. You do not need to read the Hebrew or Greek alphabet to use Strong's. The number is the key; the tool does the alphabet work for you.
• Exhaustive coverage. Strong's indexed every word in the KJV, not a curated subset. That means obscure words get the same treatment as theologically central ones.
• Public domain text. Because the King James Version itself is in the public domain and Strong's original work has long since entered the public domain as well, the entire system can be hosted, linked, and cross-referenced online for free, without licensing restrictions.

Strong's numbering has limits worth naming honestly. It reflects 19th-century Hebrew and Greek scholarship, and some entries have been refined by more recent lexicons such as BDAG (for Greek) or HALOT (for Hebrew). It also assigns one number per root word, so it does not always capture every nuance of a word's specific grammatical form in a given verse the way a full parsing tool would. Even so, for a reader who wants to move past a single English word and see the original-language term behind it, Strong's numbering is still the fastest and most universally supported way to do it.

How to look up a Strong's number in Bible Parlor

Bible Parlor's Strong's Concordance tool applies this exact system to the full KJV text, with every word in the Reader tagged to its Strong's number. To look up a number:

1. Open any verse in the Study Bible Reader and tap the English word you want to study — for instance, tap "Word" in John 1:1.
2. A reference panel opens showing the Strong's number (G3056) and a short definition.
3. Open the full entry in Strong's Concordance to see the complete definition, root, and grammatical classification.
4. Cross-check the word's full range of meaning and every other occurrence in Word Study, which lists every verse where that exact number appears.

For a broader walkthrough covering word tracing across the whole Bible, see our how-to guide, which works through Genesis 1:1 and Romans 12:2 alongside John 3:16 as additional examples.