The printing type used for the original edition was Gothic. The type style or font that the reader has before him and that with which he is familiar is Roman. Although the Roman type style originated fairly early, Gothic had been the predominate form for many years in most European countries. The printers of the original King James chose the Gothic because of its beauty and eloquence. Several of the letters are noticeably different in appearance.

The Gothic "s" looks like the Roman "s" when used as a capital letter or at the end of a word, but when it occurs as a lower case "s" at the beginning or in the middle of a word, the letter looks similar to our "f". Over 30,000 changes were of this kind, as in Mofes to Moses. The Gothic "v" looks like a Roman "u" and vice versa. Now we can see why our "w" is called a "double-u" rather than "double-v". The "v" was changed to "u" 45,281 times (i.e., Dauid to David, wiues to wives, vnto to unto). The Gothic "j" looks like our "i", hence Iudah becomes Judah, iudged to judged etc. Remember, these are not spelling changes - they are simply type style changes. These changes reflect a large percentage of the "thousands" of alterations in the KJB, but obviously such modifications do not corrupt or in any way harm the actual text.

As to the changes in orthography (spelling), we remind our reader that most histories date the beginning of Modern English around 1500. Hence, by 1611 the grammatical structure and basic vocabulary of present day English had already been firmly established. However, the spelling did not stabilize at the same time. In the 1600's spelling was largely phonetic as standards had not yet been established. Even among the well educated, an author would spell the same word several different ways, often in the same book and even on the same page. It was not until the eighteenth century that spelling began to be uniform. Therefore, in the last half of that century, the spelling of the 1611 KJB was standardized.

Over 30,000 additional changes involved dropping the final "e" off of the old English spellings such as - sunne to sun, fowle to fowl, goe to go, shee to she, nowe to now etc. Double vowels and double consonants were more common such as mee to me and ranne to ran. Other changes included ftarres to stars, ynough to enough, moneth to month, yeeres to years grinne to grin; flying to fleeing; neezed to sneezed etc.

These typographical and spelling changes account for almost all of the so-called "thousands" of alterations since 1611. Obviously none of them can be truly said to in any way alter the text. Thus they cannot honestly be compared with the thousands of actual textual changes which blatantly appear in the modern versions. The significance of this simply cannot be overstated.

As to the actual textual differences between the 1611 edition and our present editions, there are some variations û but they are not of the magnitude of a revision. Rather, they are merely the correction of early obvious printing errors. They are not textual changes made to alter the reading. This may be readily ascertained by (a) the character of the changes; (b) the frequency of the changes throughout the Bible; and (c) the time the changes were made.

In the first printing, words were occasionally inverted. A plural may have been in singular form or vice versa, and at times a word was mis-written for one that was similar. A few times a word or even a phrase was inadvertently omitted. The omissions were obvious and did not portray the doctrinal implications of those found in modern translations.

Dr. F.H.A. Scrivener compiled a list of the variations between the 1611 edition and later printings. A random sampling giving the first textual correction on consecutive left hand pages is depicted in the following chart.