A modern, public-domain English Bible — formal in structure, contemporary in vocabulary, freely usable anywhere.
The World English Bible began in 1994 as a community-driven update of the 1901 American Standard Version into modern English. The ASV's "Jehovah" was changed to "Yahweh," archaic pronouns and verb forms ("thee," "saith") were modernised, and the Greek text was switched from Westcott-Hort to the Majority Text — a Byzantine-tradition edition more in line with the textual base behind the KJV.
Unlike the major commercial translations, the WEB has no copyright. The translation team explicitly placed it in the public domain so that ministries, app developers, and study-aid publishers could distribute it without permission or fee. This is the reason you see the WEB used as the default Bible text in many free Bible apps, audio recordings, and language-learning resources.
A revision dubbed the "World English Bible British Edition" (WEBBE) was released for Commonwealth readers, with British spellings and idiomatic adjustments. Both versions are maintained on an ongoing basis as small corrections are submitted.
The WEB stays close to formal equivalence — sentence structure follows the Greek and Hebrew — but smooths out the most awkward word-for-word constructions of the ASV.
Modern, accessible vocabulary: "you" replaces "thee/thou," "says" replaces "saith," and the divine name is rendered "Yahweh" rather than "LORD" or "Jehovah" throughout the Old Testament.
Because the project is community-driven and public-domain, it sees small ongoing revisions where most copyrighted Bibles see frozen text. The text in this app reflects the current upstream WEB at build time.
Hand-picked verses that demonstrate how the WEB renders well-known passages.
Bibles that share lineage, philosophy, or canonical structure with the WEB — open any to read its history.
The most literal mainstream English Bible of its era — a scholarly revision of the KJV that informed nearly every modern formal-equivalence translation.
The most influential English Bible in history — formal, rhythmic, public-domain prose used by Christians for over four hundred years.
A modern scholarly Bible with over 60,000 translator notes — written by twenty biblical scholars and offered freely online from the beginning.
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