NOTE: Occassionally, the Search feature will respond slowly. This is not a fault of the program, but is due to the 'spin-up' time required by the CD-ROM drive. To alleviate this difficulty, you may wish to load the entire CD-ROM onto your hard drive (for instructions on how to accomplish this, please see the appropriate FAQ).

1. The Blue Letter Bible allows its users to search for words, phrases, and parts of words. The first step to using this tool is to find it. The Word/Phrase search is located on the CD's start page (just click on the BLB logo in the upper-left corner of any page). The feature sits just below the Verse Selection tool and is labelled "Word Search / Concordance" (as seen below).

2. Next there are three main ways to search using this tool. The first of these ways is to to simply input the words for which you are looking (we recommend keeping your search under five terms for the sake of expediency). In this case, we'll type "Jesus faith love." Now we hit the Search Button.

3. Entering a number of desired words—such as Jesus faith love—will search for every verse with all those words as well as permutations of the available words. This will bring up a new window displaying your search results.

4. This is what the basic Phrase Search window looks like. The entered words appear at the top followed immediately by permutations of the original search which is, in turn, followed by the results for the original search.

7. The first chain of words, "Jesus," "faith," and "love," are not linked and are displayed below this table. The reference to "8 verses below" tells you how many verses contain the text for which you originally linked.

8. Clicking on the choice "Jesus + faith" here, will take you to a listing of all 42 verses in which both the words "Jesus" and "faith" appear in the King James Version.

9. Just below this table of permutations, you will find a list of all the verses that contain every word that you submitted in your original search.

10. The second way to search is to hunt for exact phrases in Scripture. In the below example, the phrase searched is "God of my Salvation." Now simply hit the search button.

11. Below the permutations table, you will find that rather than merely listing the verses in which the four words appear, you are first given the seven verses in which the four words appear in the exact order you specified in your original request (followed by the inexact matches like in the first example).

12. The third way to search for a desired word is to search for the first portion of a word by using and asterisk (*) as illustrated below. This becomes useful if you are not certain of the the suffix or final spelling of a word.

13. As you can see there are seventeen (17) verses in the King James Version that contain words that start with "believ" and "ever." Immediately below the table of permutations is a list of different words that match your search. In this case, "believe," "believed," "believers," "believest," "believeth," and "believing" are all matches for "believ*." And for the word search "ever*," you will get "ever," "everlasting," "evermore," and "every." And "believeth every" is included in your exact match catagory, so this can be a very helpful tool.

14. For further intricacy, checkmark Show Strong's and your search results will show the Strong's number associated with each word in the resultant verses. Each of these numbers are linked and may be followed to pursue a greater depth of study.