TrustBible Research · Published 2026-10-25 · 8 min read

How many times is love mentioned in the Bible?

In the KJV, the whole word “love” appears 311 times in 281 verses (OT 131, NT 180), including “love’s” in Philemon 1:9. Leaving out “love’s” (Philemon 1:9) gives 310 in 280 (OT 131, NT 179).

Including love, loved, loveth, lovest, loving, loves and lovedst, the KJV total is 493 occurrences in 416 verses.

What counting rule gives 311?

A case-insensitive whole-word search for “love” gives 311 occurrences in 281 verses in the KJV text in this dataset. The Old Testament has 131 occurrences in 124 verses; the New Testament has 180 in 157.

The rule is /\blove\b/gi, applied to verse text only, without book headings, chapter headings or psalm titles. It counts each occurrence, including repeats within a verse. The verse total counts each matching verse once. It includes the noun and the verb, without deciding what kind of love a passage describes.

The source is data/kjv.jsonl.gz, the repository's KJV corpus associated with aruljohn/Bible-kjv. We call it the KJV text in this dataset: the available provenance does not establish a specific printing. The downloadable JSON identifies the exact corpus bytes by SHA-256.

Why do some counts say 310 instead of 311?

The 310 figure is what you get when “love’s” is treated as its own word and therefore not counted as “love”. Under that rule the result is 310 occurrences in 280 verses, with 131 Old Testament occurrences and 179 New Testament occurrences. The only difference in this corpus is Philemon 1:9:

Yet for love’s sake I rather beseech thee, being such an one as Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ.

The file uses a curly apostrophe. A whole-word boundary treats that punctuation as the end of “love”; an apostrophe-preserving tokenizer keeps “love’s” together. The generator checks both straight and curly apostrophes and confirms that this single verse explains the difference.

Bible Says About's love count reports 310 and explicitly keeps apostrophes inside words. That explains why its rule differs from ours. We have not established the tokenizer behind wikiHow, Google's AI Overview or ChatGPT: their 310 figure is consistent with this rule, but that does not prove they used it. No page in our observed comparison named Philemon 1:9 as the single differing verse.

How many times do all forms of love appear?

The seven listed forms total 493 occurrences in 416 KJV verses: 238 occurrences in the Old Testament and 255 in the New. Here “all forms” means this explicit list, not every related word or every passage about love.

Occurrence totals can be added because the listed spellings do not overlap. Verse totals cannot: one verse may contain several forms. The total row counts their union, so each verse appears only once.

Related words counted separately

Related words have their own totals and are outside the seven-form union. “Lover” and “lovers” name people; “beloved” and “lovely” are distinct derived words; “brotherly” is a separate adjective; “lovingkindness” and “lovingkindnesses” are compounds. “Charity” is a different English word. These boundaries define a reproducible spelling list, not a claim that the words are unrelated in meaning.

“Lover” has 4 occurrences in 3 verses: 1 Kings 5:1, Psalm 88:18, and twice in Titus 1:8. A loose search for the letters love would mix several of these categories into the main count.

How often does the KJV use charity?

“Charity” occurs 28 times in 24 verses, all in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 13 is a familiar example of this wording.

In the Google AI Overview captured for this question on October 25, 2026, the claim was “about 24” uses of charity. That matches the verse count, not the 28 occurrences. It does not establish how the AI produced its answer. Repeated words within a verse are exactly why the two units need separate columns.

Which books use love most?

1 John has the most occurrences of the exact word “love”: 33 in 23 verses. Song of Solomon follows with 26, then Psalms with 23. The table ranks books by the exact-word rule, including the possessive.

If the rule changes to all seven forms, John leads with 57 occurrences in 39 verses, followed by 1 John with 46 in 26, then Psalms with 41 in 41. The full per-book counts are in the JSON; the two rankings answer different questions.

What are the first and last mentions of love?

The exact word first appears in Genesis 27:4 and last in Revelation 3:19, following Bible book order. Isaac says “such as I love” in Genesis 27:4; Revelation 3:19 begins “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten”.

Including all seven forms changes both endpoints: Genesis 22:2 contains “whom thou lovest”, and Revelation 22:15 contains “whosoever loveth and maketh a lie”. These are the first and last matches under the broader rule, not under the exact-word rule.

Which verse uses love the most?

Luke 6:32 contains the exact word four times, the highest count in a single KJV verse:

For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.

Read Luke 6:32 in context. Under the rule for the seven listed forms, John 14:21 ties it with four: two instances of “loveth”, one “loved” and one “love”. That verse has only one match under the exact-word rule.

How many times is love mentioned in other translations?

We have not verified counts for NKJV, ESV, NIV or NLT. The following figures are third-party claims from the Google AI Overview captured on October 25, 2026, not results of our generator.

The captured overview linked Christianity.com and Bible Study Tools. The attribution above is to that observed AI answer; it does not establish that either linked page supports every figure. Our repository contains neither those four translation corpora nor their search parameters. A reliable comparison would hold edition, word forms, apostrophe handling and counting unit constant.

Is love the most repeated word in the Bible?

No: in this KJV dataset, both “lord” and “god” occur more often under the same case-insensitive whole-word rule. These are spelling comparisons, not a ranking of theological importance or a claim to identify the most frequent word overall.

Case-insensitive “lord” merges LORD, Lord and lord; “god” merges God and god. These counts include possessives under the same boundary rule as “love” and do not classify the referent of each use.

What is the count in the 和合本?

The character 爱 appears 981 times in 827 verses in this simplified Chinese Union Version dataset, every compound included. This is a character count, not an English-style word count, and it is not comparable to the KJV's 311.

The count includes 爱 wherever it appears: 慈爱, 亲爱的, 所爱的, 喜爱, 可爱 and 不爱惜 all contribute. Three illustrative compound counts are:

The 197 occurrences of 慈爱 are already inside the 981; do not add them again. Likewise, the other compound rows are explanations of what the character search includes, not separate amounts to add to its total.

和合本 versification: the local file has 31,100 verse rows, compared with 31,102 in the KJV. Some numbering and merged verses differ; for example, the text corresponding to John 7:53 is merged into John 8:1 in this file. The CSV preserves the repository's 和合本 references and labels them accordingly. This affects verse alignment, not the character-count rule; do not treat the two files' verse keys as a one-to-one mapping.

Download the counts and reproduce them

The CSV and JSON contain every matching verse for every reported rule, including per-verse occurrence counts, text and reader links.

• Download the love-count CSV — one row per matching verse per rule. Rules overlap; adding the entire file would double-count matches.
• Download the love-count JSON — the same evidence, corpus hashes, patterns, testament splits, per-book counts and first/last/most-repeated matches.

The JSON lists every rule’s regular expression and the SHA-256 hashes of the source corpora. Download the CSV or JSON to inspect each matching verse and its occurrence count. Rules overlap, so check each rule separately rather than adding all rows together.

For the KJV counts, the source text is publicly available from aruljohn/Bible-kjv. Anyone can download that verse text and re-run the stated regular expression on the same text, excluding headings and counting repeated matches within each verse. Count each matching verse once for the verse total. The hashes identify the corpus files used here; they are not hashes of the public repository's differently packaged files.

Ask about love in Scripture

A word count tells you where a spelling occurs; reading the passage gives its context. Ask TrustBible a question about love in Scripture, or start with 1 John 4 and John 15.

For another example of why the counting rule matters, see how many times the Bible says “fear not”.