Wycliffe's Bible. John Wycliffe
text); beam (for "tree"); box tree (for "beech tree", as corrected in glosses citing the Hebrew text); cause to stumble (for "sclaundre"); cave (for "swallow" as a noun); chamber (for "treasury"); chiefs (for "corners"); curtains (for "tents"); denounce (for "defame"); depraved (for "shrewide"); destroy (for "lose"); destroyed (for "lost"); face (for "cheer"); feeble and frail (for "sick"); foreyard (for "hall"); half (for "middle"); hinder (for "let"!); hooks (for "heads" of pillars); host (for "strength"); hosts (for "virtues"); joined (for "applied"); knowing (for "cunning"); let go (for "leave" and for "left"); lookers (for "tooters"); loves (for "teats"); lie and lying (for "leasing"); mad (for "wood"); meek (for "debonair"); meekness (for "debonairness"); one (for "to" and for "toon"); only (for "properly"); own (for "proper"); pieces (for "plates"); pit (for "lake" and for "swallow" as a noun); posts (for "fronts" and for "trees"); remember (for "record"); remnant (for "relief"); send away (for "leave"); sent away (for "left"); servant (for "child"); servants (for "children"); species (for "spices"); spoon (for "mortar", as corrected in glosses citing the Hebrew text); stick (for "tree"); stranger or visitor (for "pilgrim"); strength or power (for "virtue"); strengthened (for "comforted"); strong hold (for "strength" and for "strengthening"); stumble (for "offend"); swallow (for "to sop up"); table (for "board"); tent (for "roof"); tents (for "castles"); timber (for "tree"); turn/ed again (for "convert" and "converted"/"return" and "returned"); vessel (for "gallon"); watch (for "wake"); watcher (for "waiter" and for "waker"); a weigh, that is, a balance or scales (for "a peis"); to weigh and weight (for "peise"); well (for "lake" and for "pit"); wild (for "wood"); wood (for "tree"); young (for "birds"); young man (for "child"); and young men (for "children"). All of these substitution words are frequently found in the original text. Ten other substitutions were used which are not found in the original text: boy (for "child"); cloak (for "cloth", the singular of "clothes"); consecrate/d (for "make sacred" and "made sacred", though "consecration" is found); drowned (for "drenched"); firm (for "sad"); naturally (for "kindly"); physician (for "leech"); pledge (for "wed"); and promise (for "behest").
This seems quite a list, about 70 individual substitution words in all. But in total, they were used about 500 times. That is, out of over 700,000 words in Wycliffe's Bible, less than 1/10th of 1% of them are substitution words. Many of these words were used as substitutions five times or less. So when you read any of these words (with the exception of the final ten), almost all of the time they are there in the original text. Substitution words were only used to aid comprehension and were kept to an absolute minimum.
Other Minor Modifications
To aid comprehension and readability, two separate words in the "Wycliffe Bible" are often joined together in Wycliffe's Bible. Examples include: "in+to", "to+day", "-+self", "-+selves", "no+thing", and a few others. Conversely, and for the same reasons of comprehension and readability, many unfamiliar compound nouns found in the WB are hyphenated in Wycliffe's Bible. For example, "a3enrisynge" became "again-rising" ("resurrection"), "a3enstondynge" became "against-standing" ("standing against" or "opposing"), "a3einseiyng" became "against-saying" ("contradicting"), etc. It can also be helpful to reverse the order of hyphenated words when reading them, so "again-rising" can be read "rising again", "against-stand" can be read "stand against", "against-said" can be read "said against", and so on.
Occasionally a prefix or suffix was added to a root word to aid comprehension: "ac" to "knowledge"; "al" to "together"; "be" to "gat", "get", and "loved"; "con" to "strained"; "di" to "minished"; "en" to "close", "compass", "dure", "during", "gender", and "grave"; "re" to "quite"; "sur" to "passingly" and "ly" to "most". These prefixes and the suffix are found in abundance in the original text, as are the words "altogether", "begat", "beget", "constrained", "diminished", "enclose", "endure", "enduring", "engender", and "engrave".
Inconsequential prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns ("a", "the", "and", "selves", etc.) not found in particular "Later Version" phrases, but present in the same "Early Version" phrases, were occasionally added to the text of Wycliffe's Bible to aid comprehension and improve passage flow. They appear in square brackets, "[ ]". Such words were also added even when not found in the comparable "Early Version" verses; these inserts appear in parentheses, "( )".
Parentheses were also used to contain phrases and even entire verses which were re-ordered, re-punctuated, and, sometimes, re-worded, to aid comprehension and readability. Working with Hebrew and Latin sources, the translators produced a highly literal text that is often convoluted and confusing in English. So an effort was made to make better sense out of these passages by putting the available words (or, at times, different, but more accurate words,) into a more fluent order, with more appropriate punctuation. But this is only done with words that are found within parentheses. Such re-working always appears after the original unaltered text, and can easily be ignored, if so desired.
Punctuation overall follows the original text. Occasionally a comma was inserted to aid readability. For chapters of repetitive lists of names, numbers, places, or temple accoutrements (such as those found in Numbers, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1st Chronicles), verses were made consistent with one another. To accomplish this, commas and semi-colons were sometimes interchanged. As well, in various Psalms, it seems that semi-colons were employed to aid in oral presentation (perhaps to indicate a significant pause for breath), for their usage does not follow grammar found elsewhere in the text. So sometimes commas were substituted here. The occasional interchange of commas and semi-colons in these books aids comprehension and improves passage flow, but does not alter the meaning of any verse.
To sum up: More than 98% of the words found in Wycliffe's Old Testament, and 95% of the words that you read in Wycliffe's New Testament, are modernized spellings of the original words found in the 14th century manuscript. Less than 2% of the words in the Old Testament, and less than 5% in the New Testament, are "replacement words", that is, appropriate words chosen to replace obsolete or "dead" words. Almost all of these replacements in the Old Testament - about 100 individual words along with their various forms and tenses - and about three-quarters of the replacements in the New Testament, are found in the original text. As well, about 500 times throughout all of Wycliffe's Bible (not even 1 word for each page of this book), a word more conducive to the context was substituted for another whose meaning had radically changed over the intervening 600 years. Almost all of the substitution words (about 70 in all) were taken from elsewhere in the original text.
Ultimately, each word in Wycliffe's Bible was selected for its fidelity to the original text, as well as its ability to aid comprehension and passage flow.
Use of the KJV
When transforming the "Later Version" of the "Wycliffe Bible" into Wycliffe's Bible, reference was made to the KJV in regard to verse number, book order, book names, and (most) proper names.
Verses are not found in either version of the "Wycliffe Bible". Each chapter consists of one unbroken block of text. There are not even paragraphs. In creating Wycliffe's Bible, the "Later Version" of the WB was defined, word by word. Then the KJV was placed alongside and used to divide each chapter into the traditional verses. (The English Bible was first divided into numbered verses in the middle of the 16th century, 60 years before the KJV was printed. The King James translators copied what was already established.) As the blocks were broken up, it became readily apparent that Wycliffe and Purvey had often written first what would appear two centuries later in the KJV. (This debt is particularly obvious in the New Testament.)
The sequence of the books of the Bible to which we are accustomed long pre-dates the KJV. It appeared in some Latin Bibles at least as early as the 5th century AD. (Those Bibles in turn were influenced by the order of the books in the Septuagint, the Old Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures, from the 3rd century BC, which is our earliest complete translation of them, and the Old Latin Bibles as well.) The sequence was formally established in the accepted order at the time that the verse divisions were made (again, about 60 years before the KJV was printed). This is the same order found in the "Wycliffe Bible", which was written 150 years earlier, with one exception: "Deeds of (the) Apostles" (in some copies of both versions of the WB entitled "Actus Apostolorum", Latin for "Acts of the Apostles") is placed after Hebrews and before James. In Wycliffe's New Testament, "Deeds"/"Actus" is returned to its more familiar position between The Gospel of John and The Epistle of Paul to the Romans. In short, Wycliffe's Bible simply follows the WB order (but excludes