Literal Word Review (2026): Free NASB 1995, LSB, ESV Reader

Item: Literal Word
Rating: 4.9
Author: Jaeden Schafer

Starting price: Free
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: iOS - Android - Web
Developer: Nicholas Honda
Launched: 2019
Updated: Jul 26, 2026

4.9 from 1,168 ratingsApp Store rating

4.9 from 3,480 reviews, 100,000+ installsGoogle Play

5 (NASB 1995, LSB, ESV, NKJV, KJV)Translations included

Free, no in-app purchases, no adsPrice

4.4.5, released 8 July 2026Latest iOS version

The verdict

The best free reader for anyone whose Bible is the NASB 1995 or the Legacy Standard Bible, with real Greek and Hebrew lexicons underneath every word and nothing else competing for the screen. Skip it if you need NASB 2020, audio, reading plans, a language other than English, or a vendor that will tell you how it is funded.

Try Literal Word ↗

Opens literalword.com

Literal Word started as a website in 2011 and reached the App Store on 2 May 2019. It is now on version 4.4.5, shipped 8 July 2026, and the store lists a single seller and a single copyright line: Nicholas Honda. That reads as a one-person project, and it partly is - but the about page says the site was "Created by three sinners saved by grace through faith in Christ," and Three Sixteen Publishing, which publishes the Legacy Standard Bible, described the team as three volunteer programmers. So: one named rights holder, a small unincorporated team, no company, no ministry masthead.

The common description of Literal Word as a single-translation NASB app is out of date. The current build carries five: NASB 1995, Legacy Standard Bible, English Standard Version, New King James Version and King James Version. The app explains the selection criterion itself - all five were chosen "for faithfully utilizing a word-for-word instead of a thought-for-thought translation method." There is no NIV, no CSB, no NLT, no paraphrase, and the store lists English as the only language. That is a stated editorial position, not an omission.

The edition question matters more than the count. Literal Word carries NASB 1995 and does not carry NASB 2020. In its place is the Legacy Standard Bible, published in 2021 by Three Sixteen Publishing in partnership with The Lockman Foundation and produced at The Master's Seminary as a direct revision of the 1995 text. If you stayed on 1995 because the 2020 revision added gender-accuracy renderings such as "or sisters" in italics alongside "brothers," this app is built for exactly that reader. If you want the 2020 text, it does not have it.

The interesting thing about a free app of this quality is what its own legal pages reveal. The terms of use publish the licence chain verse text usually hides, the privacy policy discloses data collection that both app stores flatly deny, and nowhere across the site does the vendor say how any of it is paid for.

✓ The good

Free with no tier above it - no in-app purchases on either store, no ads, no subscription, no per-translation unlock, and no upsell surface anywhere in the app description
Five word-for-word translations in one reader - NASB 1995, LSB, ESV, NKJV and KJV, which is the tightest formal-equivalence set any free app assembles in a single place
One of very few free apps pairing NASB 1995 with the Legacy Standard Bible - the two texts a 1995 loyalist wants together, since the LSB is a revision of that same 1995 base
Real lexicons, not a gloss list - Abbott-Smith for Greek and Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, two taps from any word, with cross-references linked from the entries
Genuinely offline - the vendor states the app is "100% free and functional even when you're offline," at a 60.4 MB iOS download, with cloud backup and sync as a free opt-in on top
Properly licensed, and it shows its work - the terms name every rights holder, including "Copyright (c) 1960-1995 by The Lockman Foundation" for the NASB
Deliberately empty of everything else - the description promises "No ads, articles, or social media," and there is no feed and no community tab to switch off

✗ Watch out

Both app stores disclose no data collection while the vendor's own privacy policy discloses plenty - Apple prints "The developer does not collect any data from this app" and Google Play says no data is collected or shared, but literalword.com/privacy lists email address, password hash, notes, highlights, bookmarks, device type, OS, app version, interaction events and IP address, plus Google Firebase and Google Analytics
No NASB 2020 - the app stops at the 1995 text, so a reader who wants the current NASB edition has to go to the official NASB Bible app instead
Funding is never disclosed - no donate page, no sponsor, no denomination, no grant and no ministry filing appears anywhere on the site, and the terms cap liability at "the greater of $1 or amounts paid in the prior month," which quietly confirms that amount is usually zero
English only - the store lists one language code, EN, and the five translations are all English, so there is no Spanish, Portuguese or any other localisation
The lexicons are public-domain vintage - Abbott-Smith's Greek manual lexicon and Brown-Driver-Briggs date from the early twentieth century, so nothing here matches BDAG or HALOT for current scholarship
Support is one email address - contact@literalword.com is the only channel published, with no FAQ, ticketing system, phone line or documented response time, and the widget terms disclaim any "guarantee of availability, uptime, or performance"

Best for

NASB 1995 readers who never moved to the 2020 revision
Legacy Standard Bible readers wanting a free mobile reader
Word study on a phone without a paid study platform
Anyone who wants a Bible app with no feed and no notifications

Avoid if

You need the NASB 2020 text
You want audio Bible or reading plans
You read in a language other than English
You depend on a vendor with published funding and support

What Literal Word is

Literal Word is a distraction-free Bible reader built around formal-equivalence English translations and original-language lexicons. The web app and the mobile app share the same five texts: NASB 1995, Legacy Standard Bible, ESV, NKJV and KJV. Tapping a word opens its lexicon entry - Abbott-Smith for Greek, Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew - with cross-references linked from those entries.

The rest is storage for your own work: notes inside verses, highlights, multi-colour bookmarks, passage history, dark mode and free account-based sync. There are no devotionals, no reading plans, no audio, no video and no social layer. The vendor's stated reason is blunt: "a straightforward approach to a Bible app maximizes attention to the word of God."

The NASB 1995 line, kept alive by volunteers

The NASB has forked. The Lockman Foundation published the 2020 revision, which among other changes adds gender-accuracy renderings in italics, and many readers who memorised from the 1995 text declined to follow. Those readers split two ways: some stayed on 1995, some moved to the Legacy Standard Bible - the 2021 revision of the 1995 base, produced at The Master's Seminary with John MacArthur Charitable Trust sponsorship and published by Three Sixteen Publishing in partnership with Lockman.

Literal Word serves both halves of that split in one free reader, and that is the reason to install it. NASB 1995 and LSB sit in the same translation switcher, which makes the LSB's specific departures legible - "Yahweh" where the NASB prints LORD, "slave" where it prints servant, capitalised divine pronouns. That this is maintained by a three-person volunteer team rather than a publisher is the whole story: a licensing arrangement a corporate product would monetise, given away.

Lexicons on every word

The lexicon layer is what separates Literal Word from a plain reader. Tap any word and the app opens the entry from Abbott-Smith's Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament or Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, with linked cross-references so you can walk from a word to the other places it appears. Combined with the visual word-search filter, that is the study loop the app is built around, and it works offline.

The limitation is the age of the sources. Abbott-Smith and BDB are early twentieth-century public-domain works, which is precisely why a free app can ship them. They remain useful and widely cited, but they are not the current standards - a reader who needs BDAG or HALOT is looking at a paid platform. Literal Word never claims otherwise; the store description says only "complete lexicons for original Hebrew and Greek words."

What the terms of use actually admit

Most free Bible apps say nothing about their licences. Literal Word's terms name every rights holder in the stack: NASB 1995 as "Copyright (c) 1960-1995 by The Lockman Foundation," the LSB as "Copyright (c) 2021 by The Lockman Foundation, managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc.," the ESV as licensed through Crossway with quotation limits and attribution requirements, the NKJV as "Copyright (c) 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission," and the KJV as public domain in the United States but Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom. This is a licensed product, not a scrape.

The same page states the restrictions those licences impose on you. Personal study, copy-and-paste and short quotations are permitted within each rights holder's limits, but you may not "redistribute, republish, scrape, or otherwise mass-extract" the text. The BibleTagger widget, which auto-links Bible references on third-party sites, may not be used "as a backend, data source, or content feed for any other application," ships as-is with no uptime guarantee, and sits under a liability cap of the greater of $1 or what you paid last month. What the terms never state is whether Literal Word pays licence fees.

Sync, and the privacy gap

Backup and sync are free and account-based. Create an account and your bookmarks, highlights and notes follow you across devices; delete it in Settings and the privacy policy says data is removed immediately with backups rolling off afterwards. The policy also commits that your notes are not used to train machine-learning models, that data is not sold or shared for advertising, and that the app "does not track you across other apps or websites."

That policy is more candid than the store listings, and the mismatch is the sharpest thing in this review. Apple's App Privacy panel reads "Data Not Collected - The developer does not collect any data from this app," and Google Play's Data safety section reports no data collected and none shared with third parties. The privacy policy, by contrast, lists an email address, a password hash, an internal identifier, notes and highlights, device type, OS, app version, interaction events and IP address, and names Google Firebase and Google Analytics. Both cannot be true, and the policy is the document written by the people who built the app.

Pricing

Free

Everything: NASB 1995, LSB, ESV, NKJV and KJV, the Abbott-Smith Greek and Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicons, footnotes, linked cross-references, word search with visual filtering, notes, highlights, multi-colour bookmarks, dark mode, passage history, offline use and free online backup and sync. Neither store lists an in-app purchase and the app carries no advertising. What funds it is not published anywhere on literalword.com - no donate page, no sponsor credit, no named ministry, and no statement about donations or commercial support in the terms of use.

There is one tier and it is free. Neither the App Store nor Google Play lists an in-app purchase, there is no subscription, and no translation is gated behind a payment - the ESV, NKJV and LSB all arrive with the base install alongside NASB 1995 and KJV.

Free here also means free of advertising. The store description promises "No ads, articles, or social media," and the privacy policy backs it with "We do not sell or share your data for advertising." There is no verse-of-the-day banner, no sponsored plan and no affiliate bookstore.

What is missing is any account of who pays. Literal Word publishes no donate page, no support-us link, no sponsor credit, no denominational parent and no nonprofit identification, and the terms of use say nothing about donations or commercial support. For a product licensing four copyrighted translations from three separate rights holders, that is a real question, and the honest answer is that the vendor has not published it.

One indirect signal sits in the terms: liability is capped at "the greater of $1 or amounts paid in the prior month." That clause only makes sense in a product where the amount paid is normally nothing, and it is the closest the site comes to describing its own economics.

The practical consequence is longevity risk rather than cost risk. A free app with no disclosed revenue and a three-person volunteer team can stop shipping updates at any point, and its licences sit between the developer and Lockman, Crossway and Thomas Nelson rather than between you and them.

Where Literal Word falls behind

No audio, at all. The published key-features list runs to seventeen items and none of them is narration, so a commuter or a reader with low vision gets nothing here; Dwell, Through the Word and the NIV audio apps exist for a reason. No text-to-speech is advertised either, and no video.

No reading plans and no devotional scaffolding. YouVersion's entire product is the plan library, and the Bible Recap builds a year of structure around a schedule. Literal Word offers passage history and nothing else - if you want a plan you bring your own and use this only as the reader.

One language, five English translations. The store lists EN as the sole language code, which rules out the app for a Spanish, Portuguese or Mandarin reader entirely. The five texts on offer are also all from the same formal-equivalence family, so there is no thought-for-thought counterweight inside the app when a literal rendering is opaque.

No commentary and no modern reference works. There is no study-note layer, no maps, no timelines and no topical index, and the two lexicons are century-old public-domain editions. Blue Letter Bible's free app carries Strong's, commentaries and interlinear views; Logos and Accordance carry BDAG and HALOT behind a paywall. Literal Word is a reader with a word-lookup, and it stops there.

Thin and undocumented support. One email address, contact@literalword.com, is the only channel; there is no FAQ, no help centre and no published response time. The nasb.literalword.com host that most external links still point at now 302-redirects to literalword.com/nasb after a late-2025 web redesign, so old deep links into that subdomain are worth re-checking.

Literal Word vs. NASB Bible vs. Blue Letter Bible

The NASB Bible app is The Lockman Foundation's own reader and it is the reference point here, so be clear about the difference: it is the official app, it is free, and it carries both NASB 2020 and NASB 1995 - it is the only one of the two that gives you the 2020 text. What it does not carry is any other translation, or lexicons, or original-language tools. Literal Word is the opposite trade: no 2020 edition, but five formal-equivalence translations including the Legacy Standard Bible, plus Greek and Hebrew lexicons on every word. If your question is which NASB edition, the official app wins on coverage. If it is NASB 1995 next to LSB with a lexicon, Literal Word is the answer.

Blue Letter Bible's free app is the closest thing to a superset on the study side: Strong's numbers, interlinear views, multiple commentaries, a much wider translation list. It is also visually busier and heavier. The honest split is that Blue Letter Bible is the better research tool and Literal Word is the better reading surface - the app you open to read a chapter without deciding anything first.

Among minimalist readers, NeuBible is the design comparison, and it is paid with a narrower translation set. Olive Tree offers a far bigger library, including the LSB, at the cost of a storefront and regular upsell. Literal Word's position is specific and defensible: the free, quiet, five-translation reader for the word-for-word crowd.

The bottom line

Literal Word is the best free reader for the NASB 1995 and Legacy Standard Bible constituency, and the lexicon layer makes it more than a text viewer - 4.9 from 1,168 App Store ratings and 4.9 from 3,480 Google Play reviews across 100,000+ installs is a strong signal for a volunteer project. Install it if the 1995 line is your Bible and you want it quiet; go to the official NASB Bible app if you need the 2020 edition, and go elsewhere for audio, plans or any language other than English. Hold two things in mind while you use it: the funding model is genuinely unpublished, and the stores' "no data collected" disclosures do not match the developer's own privacy policy.

Alternatives to Literal Word

NASB Bible 4.9The Lockman Foundation's official app, free and ad-free, and the one place to get both NASB 2020 and NASB 1995. Single translation only, with no lexicons or original-language tools - the mirror image of Literal Word's trade-off.

Blue Letter Bible 4.9Free app with Strong's numbers, interlinear views, commentaries and a wide translation list. Denser and busier than Literal Word, and better if you want research rather than a clean reading surface.

ESV Bible 4.7Crossway's own free ESV reader with audio and reading plans. One translation, but it covers the audio and plan gaps that Literal Word leaves entirely open.

Olive Tree Bible App 4.8Free core app over a large paid library that includes the LSB and serious study resources. Far more available, at the cost of a storefront and regular upsell inside the reader.NeuBible 4.2Paid minimalist reader with a strong typographic design and a narrower translation set. The direct aesthetic comparison, without the lexicons or the free price.

Frequently asked questions

Which NASB edition does Literal Word use - 1995 or 2020?

NASB 1995, and only NASB 1995. The app description and the website both list the text as New American Standard Bible (NASB 1995), and the NASB 2020 revision is not included. If you want the 2020 text you need The Lockman Foundation's own NASB Bible app, which carries both editions. Literal Word instead pairs the 1995 text with the Legacy Standard Bible, the 2021 revision of that same 1995 base.

Is it really free, and how is it funded?

It is free, with no in-app purchases listed on either store, no subscription, no ads and no gated translations. How it is funded is not published. There is no donate page, no sponsor credit, no denominational parent and no nonprofit identification anywhere on literalword.com, and the terms of use say nothing about donations or commercial support. The about page states only that the site was created by three sinners saved by grace through faith in Christ, and Three Sixteen Publishing has described the team as three volunteer programmers.

How does it license the NASB if it is free?

The terms of use name the rights holders explicitly: NASB 1995 as Copyright (c) 1960-1995 by The Lockman Foundation, the LSB as Copyright (c) 2021 by The Lockman Foundation managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc., the ESV as licensed through Crossway with quotation limits and attribution requirements, the NKJV as Copyright (c) 1982 by Thomas Nelson used by permission, and the KJV as public domain in the United States but Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom. So the texts are licensed rather than scraped. Whether money changes hands, and how much, is not disclosed by Literal Word or by any of the rights holders.

Does the app collect any data?

The two answers on record contradict each other. Apple's App Privacy panel says "Data Not Collected - The developer does not collect any data from this app," and Google Play's Data safety section reports no data collected and none shared with third parties. Literal Word's own privacy policy discloses collecting an email address, password hash and internal identifier at signup, your bookmarks, highlights and free-text notes, and diagnostics including device type, OS, app version, interaction events and IP address, with Google Firebase handling authentication and sync and Google Analytics running on the website. The policy also states that data is not sold or shared for advertising, that the app does not track you across other apps or websites, and that your notes are not used to train machine-learning models.

Which translations are included, and can I read them side by side?

Five: NASB 1995, Legacy Standard Bible, ESV, NKJV and KJV. All five were chosen, in the vendor's words, for using a word-for-word rather than a thought-for-thought translation method, so there is no NIV, CSB, NLT or paraphrase. The published feature list covers switching translations, footnotes, linked cross-references, word search with visual filtering, notes, highlights, bookmarks, dark mode and passage history; a dedicated side-by-side parallel view is not among the features the vendor advertises.

What are the Greek and Hebrew lexicons, exactly?

Abbott-Smith for Greek and Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, both reachable in a couple of taps from a word in the text, with cross-references linked from the entries. Both are early twentieth-century public-domain works, which is why they can ship in a free app. They remain genuinely useful for word study, but they are not current scholarship - BDAG and HALOT are the modern standards, and both are commercial reference works sold through paid platforms.

Does it work offline, and does my data sync?

Yes to both. The vendor states the app is 100% free and functional offline, at a 60.4 MB iOS download, and free online backup and sync are included with an account so notes, highlights and bookmarks follow you between devices. Accounts can be deleted from Settings, after which the privacy policy says data is removed immediately with backups rolling off afterwards. The app requires iOS 14.0 or later on Apple devices; Google Play lists 100,000+ installs and a last update of 7 July 2026.

Literal Word