Published 2026-11-01 · 5 min read
How many times is heart mentioned in the Bible?
The word “heart” appears 833 times in 765 verses of the King James Bible, 727 of them in the Old Testament. With “hearts” (113) it is 946 in 871 verses. Psalms uses it most (125).
Download the per-verse CSV to check every match yourself. The method file (JSON) lists the rule, the source hash and every result.
How we counted
Rule: whole word, any case, in the verse text of our King James Version file. A letter, digit, underscore or hyphen next to the match disqualifies it, so a form never matches inside a longer word; possessives such as “’s” stay in. An occurrence is one match; a verse counts once however many matches it holds. This is the same rule as our Bible word counter.
| Form | Occurrences | Verses | In the headline |
|---|---|---|---|
| heart | 833 | 765 | yes |
| hearts | 113 | 111 | no |
| Headline total | 833 | 765 |
Verse totals cannot be added across rows: one verse can contain more than one form.
Heart, soul and mind
In the Bible the heart is mostly the inner person, not the organ: where thinking, choosing and loving happen (“Keep thy heart with all diligence”, Proverbs 4:23). For comparison, “soul” appears 459 times and “mind” 95 times in the same KJV text. “Hearted” (8, as in “faint hearted”), “heartily” (1) and “hearth” (7) are different words and are not included.
Old Testament, New Testament and each book
| Testament | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| Old Testament | 727 | 666 |
| New Testament | 106 | 99 |
| Book (KJV) | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| Psalms | 125 | 121 |
| Proverbs | 81 | 78 |
| Jeremiah | 58 | 52 |
| Deuteronomy | 47 | 43 |
| Ecclesiastes | 40 | 32 |
| Isaiah | 40 | 36 |
| Ezekiel | 38 | 30 |
| Exodus | 37 | 34 |
| 2 Chronicles | 35 | 34 |
| 1 Kings | 34 | 30 |
Show the other 44 books with at least one match
| Book (KJV) | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Samuel | 23 | 22 |
| Job | 23 | 23 |
| Acts | 19 | 18 |
| 1 Chronicles | 18 | 15 |
| 2 Samuel | 15 | 13 |
| Matthew | 15 | 14 |
| 2 Kings | 14 | 12 |
| Daniel | 14 | 13 |
| Judges | 12 | 11 |
| Luke | 12 | 10 |
| Genesis | 11 | 10 |
| Mark | 10 | 10 |
| Romans | 10 | 10 |
| Lamentations | 9 | 9 |
| Hosea | 9 | 9 |
| John | 7 | 6 |
| 2 Corinthians | 7 | 7 |
| Joshua | 5 | 5 |
| Nehemiah | 5 | 5 |
| Song of Solomon | 5 | 4 |
| Hebrews | 5 | 5 |
| Esther | 4 | 4 |
| Zechariah | 4 | 3 |
| Malachi | 4 | 2 |
| 1 Corinthians | 4 | 3 |
| Ephesians | 4 | 4 |
| Numbers | 3 | 3 |
| Ezra | 3 | 3 |
| Zephaniah | 3 | 3 |
| 1 John | 3 | 2 |
| Leviticus | 2 | 2 |
| Joel | 2 | 2 |
| Obadiah | 2 | 1 |
| 1 Peter | 2 | 2 |
| Ruth | 1 | 1 |
| Nahum | 1 | 1 |
| Philippians | 1 | 1 |
| Colossians | 1 | 1 |
| 1 Thessalonians | 1 | 1 |
| 1 Timothy | 1 | 1 |
| 2 Timothy | 1 | 1 |
| James | 1 | 1 |
| 2 Peter | 1 | 1 |
| Revelation | 1 | 1 |
First: Genesis 6:5. Last: Revelation 18:7. The most in one verse is 3, in Deuteronomy 30:6, 1 Kings 11:4, 2 Kings 10:15, Ezekiel 11:19, Ezekiel 28:2, Ezekiel 36:26, Luke 6:45. 12 of the 66 books have no match.
Check the count yourself
Open heart-count-audit.csv in a spreadsheet: 871 rows plus a header, one for every verse containing a counted form. The headline_occurrences column sums to 833 (=SUM over it) and has 765 non-zero rows (=COUNTIF(range,">0")). The context_url column opens each verse.
Or recount from scratch. Download count-words.py and run it with Python 3:
python count-words.py --output-dir results
It uses only Python’s standard library, downloads the pinned KJV file, checks its SHA-256 (0c3b8afefa4efaa8bd72576682c8ad060e4ccb499e81943a9678de49ab9416ad) and writes every CSV and the method JSON. The KJV text was imported from aruljohn/Bible-kjv; its exact printing is unknown. Only verse text is counted: no headings, notes or Apocrypha.
To count another word with the same rule, use the Bible word counter.
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