How many times does the word tongue appear in the Bible?

Answer 1

You will find the word "tongue" more often in older translations.

For example, in the 1611 King James Version (KJV), a biblegateway.com search returns 160 matches for "tongue" (and "tongues," etc.).

When I switch to the 1978 New International Version (NIV), the same search returns 137 results.

"Tongue" was once a very common synonym for "language." These days, we would probably use it with that meaning only poetically or humorously (e.g. "English is my native tongue"). Therefore, it seems that recent translators use "tongue" slightly less often when they need an English word for "language."

Keep in mind that some translations include the Deutero-Canonical or Apocryphal books whose canonicity is debated, while others omit these books. These differences may effect your word count.

You should be able to study all of the instances, in various translations, on a specialized Bible search site.

Or, you can download the entire text of The Bible onto your computer - the Gutenberg Project has the KJV and the Douay-Rheims Version - and then you can use your computer's finder/ browser/ catalog system to search locally.