Published 2026-11-06 · 7 min read

How many times is prayer mentioned in the Bible?

Published by Jeff Song, who runs TrustBible · Written with AI assistance

The word “prayer” appears 109 times in KJV numbered verses. Counting five Psalm titles raises the total to 114. See the verse audit and counting rules.

Check “prayer” in the Bible word counter, or download the verse audit to see exactly what was counted.

In the numbered verses of the King James Version (KJV) counted here, the singular word “prayer” appears 109 times in 104 verses: 78 occurrences in the Old Testament and 31 in the New Testament. Include five Psalm titles containing “Prayer,” and the total becomes 114. Both numbers can describe a clearly stated counting scope. Neither is a count of every act of prayer in the Bible.

Why do some counts say 109 and others 114?

In this counting model, the five-occurrence difference is explained by Psalm superscriptions: the short titles before the numbered verses. Our downloadable KJV corpus contains numbered verses but omits these titles. A check of all 150 Psalm chapter pages in eBible’s KJV found five titles containing the singular word “Prayer”: Psalms 17, 86, 90, 102 and 142.

The second row is an explicit alternative counting model. The eBible pages show the titles before verse 1; we attach each title to that verse only to demonstrate the reference count. We have not audited every edition or every concordance that reports 114.

The five titles that change the total

Each title adds one occurrence, so 109 + 5 = 114. Only three add a previously unmatched verse reference, so 104 + 3 = 107. Psalm 17:1 and Psalm 102:1 already contain “prayer” in the numbered text. Within Psalms alone, the word count rises from 29 to 34 when these titles are included.

Prayer, prayers and pray are different searches

A search for the noun “prayer” does not include the plural “prayers” or the verb “pray.” Here are seven separately counted forms in the same numbered KJV text:

These seven forms total 540 occurrences. The nouns “prayer” and “prayers” together total 133 occurrences in 128 verses. Do not add the table’s verse counts to find the number of distinct verses: one verse can contain several forms.

You may also see 547 quoted for “pray” and its variants, including in Tithely’s article. Our seven-form rule returns 540, and the five singular-word titles do not explain the full difference. We do not know which additional text or matching rule produced 547, so we don’t treat it as the same measurement.

Why 109 occurrences fit into 104 verses

A verse can repeat the same word. Five verses contain “prayer” twice: 1 Kings 8:28, 2 Chronicles 6:19, Nehemiah 1:11, Psalm 102:17 and Isaiah 56:7. Count each word occurrence and you get 109; count each matching verse once and you get 104.

That distinction matters when comparing a concordance’s “results” with a word-frequency table. Check what one result represents before comparing totals.

Does the Bible contain 650 prayers?

That is a different question. The Gospel Coalition’s prayer overview repeats a figure of 650 listed prayers. Such a catalogue counts prayer passages or events, not occurrences of an English word. We have not independently audited that catalogue and do not derive 650 from this dataset.

Two examples show why word counting cannot settle the question:

• In Genesis 12:13, Abram says “I pray thee” to Sarai. That is a request to another person, so a literal “pray” match is not necessarily prayer addressed to God.
• The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9–13 is a prayer even though those verses do not contain the singular noun “prayer.” A noun search cannot find every prayer passage.

To count prayer events, you would need another method: define a prayer, decide whether parallel Gospel accounts count once or separately, and publish the passages with those decisions. This page makes the narrower, reproducible word-count claim.

How to check or reproduce these numbers

1. Use the same text. Download the KJV verse corpus: 31,102 rows across 66 books. It excludes Apocrypha, Psalm titles, footnotes and editorial headings.
2. Set the matching rule. Match the exact word without regard to case. A match cannot be joined to a letter, digit, underscore or hyphen on either side. That excludes “prayers” and hyphenated compounds but includes a possessive such as “prayer’s.” Do not stem “prayer” into “pray,” include plurals automatically, or search navigation and notes.
3. Keep both units. Sum word matches for occurrences; count each matching verse once for the verse total.
4. Handle titles separately. The JSON contains the five source-linked titles and their verse-1 overlap. Keep these outside the numbered-verse rows unless you deliberately choose the alternative scope.

The CSV audit has one row for each matched form in each verse, followed by five clearly labelled superscription rows. Filter scope to numbered-verse and form to prayer to reproduce 109; adding the superscription rows gives 114. The JSON dataset and method include all matching rows, totals and the corpus SHA-256. The TypeScript generator (scripts/generate-prayer-counts.ts) runs from the repository root with npx tsx scripts/generate-prayer-counts.ts.

Scope checked November 6, 2026. The heading audit uses eBible’s KJV chapter pages; it is not a recount of a second complete Bible corpus. English translation choices and text packaging can change these results. For another translation, repeat the count rather than transferring a KJV total.

Want to examine a match in context? Open the “prayer” results and read the surrounding chapter before drawing a conclusion from the number.