2,579 Words Appear Only Once in the Bible
Answering: “words that appear once in the Bible”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Words that occur once are called hapax legomena, and they are the reason a vocabulary list is a bad plan for reading. Learning every word in the Bible means learning 2,579 you will meet a single time; skipping them costs almost nothing, because together they account for 0.4% of word tokens.
Most are names, places and hapax technical terms — the measurements of the tabernacle, the stones of the breastplate, the officials of a foreign court. The practical response is to read with a tap-to-reveal reader and let them go.
The opposite end of the distribution is where study time belongs: 1,900 words cover 90% of the text, and the site's decks are built from that end of the list.
| Word | Word | Word | Word | Word | Word |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 上分 | 拉活 | 送走 | 罪大恶极 | 纵横 | 略作 |
| 联盟 | 精练 | 惊人 | 女同 | 喜事 | 声闻 |
| 二人转 | 戏言 | 天明 | 来历 | 同父异母 | 合家 |
| 遮羞 | 女仆 | 睛 | 加进 | 庶出 | 两国 |
| 皮衣 | 玩 | 日增 | 埃 | 羔皮 | 民事 |
| 聚齐 | 神气 | 俊秀 | 深爱 | 不一定 | 裙子 |
2,579 words in total; 36 shown.
Questions
- Should I learn them?
- Not deliberately. Recognise the shape, tap for the meaning, move on — that is what the reader is for.
- Are they all names?
- Not all, but many: 662 words in this text look like proper names by their dictionary gloss.
- Which words should I learn instead?
- The 825 most frequent, which cover 80% of the text. The decks are ordered exactly that way.
Related reference pages
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).