Guide
How to read a Bible verse reference
Last reviewed
A Bible reference is a short address. Once you can read the punctuation, you can find any passage in any Bible, in any translation, in a few seconds.
This is worth ten minutes because references are the only reliable way to check whether a verse you have been shown is real, complete and quoted accurately.
The basic shape
A reference has three parts: the book, the chapter and the verse. In John 3:16, “John” is the book, “3” is the chapter and “16” is the verse. The colon separates chapter from verse.
Books with only one chapter — Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John and Jude — are cited by verse alone. “Jude 3” means verse three, not chapter three.
Psalms are conventionally cited in the singular when you mean one of them: the book is Psalms, but the individual poem is Psalm 23.
Reading the punctuation
The punctuation between numbers tells you what kind of range you are looking at.
- A hyphen or dash — A continuous run of verses. Psalm 23:1-3 means verses one, two and three.
- A comma — Separate, non-adjacent verses. Romans 8:28, 38-39 means verse 28, then verses 38 to 39.
- A semicolon — A jump to a different chapter or book. Isaiah 40:31; 41:10 means one verse from each chapter.
- “f” or “ff” — Older commentaries use “f” for “and the following verse” and “ff” for “and the following verses”. Modern writing usually spells the range out instead.
Abbreviations
Books are frequently abbreviated, and the abbreviations are not fully standardised. Ps or Psa is Psalms; Rom is Romans; 1 Cor and I Cor are both 1 Corinthians; Mt, Matt and Mat are all Matthew.
Numbered books can be written with an Arabic numeral (1 John), a Roman numeral (I John), or a word (First John). They all mean the same thing.
The search box on this site accepts all of these forms, so you can paste a reference in whatever style you found it.
Where the numbers came from
Chapter and verse numbers are not part of the original writings. The chapter divisions in common use are usually credited to Stephen Langton in the early thirteenth century, and the verse divisions for the New Testament to the printer Robert Estienne in the mid-sixteenth.
This matters more than it sounds. The numbers are a navigation aid added long after the texts were written, and they occasionally fall in awkward places — mid-sentence, or between two halves of an argument.
That is one of the reasons this site always shows the verses either side of a passage and links to the whole chapter. The verse number tells you where something is; it does not tell you where the thought begins and ends.
Why some verse numbers are missing
If you look up Luke 17:36 or Acts 8:37 in most modern Bibles, you will find the number present but no text, or a footnote instead of a verse.
This is not an error and nothing has been removed to change the meaning. Verse numbering was fixed on the basis of the printed Greek text available in the sixteenth century. Manuscripts discovered since then do not contain those particular verses, so translations that follow the older manuscript evidence leave the number in place — to keep every other verse number correct — and note the absence.
This site shows those verses as absent and says so, rather than quietly renumbering the chapter.
Common questions
- What does the colon in John 3:16 mean?
- It separates the chapter number from the verse number. John 3:16 is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel of John.
- Why is it Psalm 23 and not Psalms 23?
- The book is called Psalms because it is a collection. An individual poem within it is a psalm, so a single one is cited in the singular: Psalm 23.
- What does Jude 3 mean if Jude has no chapters?
- Jude has only one chapter, so references to it give the verse number alone. Jude 3 is the third verse of the letter.