Frequency Thresholds
tl;dr: For the New Testament, it is recommended to gloss words that occur fewer than 30 times. For the Old Testament, it is recommended to gloss words that occur fewer than 50 times.
A preliminary: In this section, when we talk about a “word” we are talking about the word you would find in the dictionary. For instance λόγος is one Greek word—even though it has different forms for nominative, accusative, and so forth. (And even though λόγος occurs 330 times in the New Testament, it still just counts as one word.)
There are 5,461 words in the New Testament. The way language works is, some words occur very frequently (like the in English), but then most words occur far less frequently. In the New Testament, out of 5,461 words, 1,966 of them only occur once!
When you’re preparing a reader’s Bible, you have to decide which words to gloss. For instance, for the New Testament, it typical for a publisher to say, “Words that occur less than 30 times are glossed.” The lower the threshold, the more words you will have to gloss; and the fewer words your reader will need to know.
The chart below shows this tradeoff for the New Testament.
| If you gloss words occurring less than ___ times… | …then you will have to gloss this many words: | …and your reader will have to know this many words: |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | 5,157 | 304 |
| 40 | 5,092 | 369 |
| 30 | 5,008 | 453 |
| 20 | 4,848 | 613 |
| 10 | 4,419 | 1042 |
As you can see in the chart below, glossing words that occur fewer than 30 times is very reasonable. It means that the reader is expected to have just 453 Greek words memorized. Most people probably have that at the end of two or three semesters.
We can look at the same chart for the Old Testament. Of course, it is a lot longer. There are 9,230 words in the Old Testament. (3,071 of them only occur once!) Many reader’s Bibles that have the Old Testament draw the line at 50 words. This means that the reader is expected to know 732 words.
| If you gloss words occurring less than ___ times… | …then you will have to gloss this many words: | …and your reader will have to know this many words: |
|---|---|---|
| 70 | 8,658 | 572 |
| 60 | 8,596 | 634 |
| 50 | 8,498 | 732 |
| 40 | 8,324 | 906 |
| 30 | 8,098 | 1,132 |
| 20 | 7,732 | 1,498 |
| 10 | 6,897 | 2,333 |
Why not gloss all the words?
You can certainly gloss all of the words if you wish to do so. There are two reasons you might not want to:
- A reader's Bible is for people who have a basic grasp of the language. People shouldn't need to look up every word. (See Reader’s Bibles and Interlinear Bibles)
- It will require a lot more work for you to gloss the words that occur very frequently.
Although it’s true there aren’t many words that occur very frequently, it’s also true that those words will have many more meanings. For instance, the Greek word λόγος can mean “word” (or “Word”!), “message,” or “report” depending on the context. The more time a word occurs, the more attention it will require.
If you do wish to gloss all of the words, however, you can do that by using a frequency cutoff of 7,000 for the Old Testament, and 20,000 for the New Testament.