What is Logos for Us

Words Mean Things and it the study of those meanings and how they carry across languages and Bible translations that is the serendipity of the Logos for Us system.

Milestones in Word Studies

Peter Merk Roget was a British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget's Thesaurus), a classified collection of related words. Roget began preparing for publication of his thesaurus about 1848, the one work that was to perpetuate his memory. This was the catalogue of words organized by their meanings, the compilation of which had been an avocation since 1805. Its first printed edition, in 1852, was called Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.

James Strong was born in the early 1800s and was a Methodist scholar. He distinguished himself at Wesleyan Seminary, Troy University and Drew Theological Seminary where he taught for many years. His best known work is Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, first published in 1890. "Strong's numbering" of Greek and Hebrew words, have dominated the enumeration of such words in Bible study helps to the present day. For the concordance, Strong numbered every Hebrew or Greek root word which was found, for ease of reference. This numbering system (8674 Hebrew roots and 5523 Greek roots) is now widely used in the English speaking world.

Beginning in the mid 1900's, James Louw and Eugune Nida, building on the concept developed by Roget and Strong, created a a modern Greek lexicon using the concept of "semantic domains." This lexicon differs from other lexicons in that it does not arrange words alphabetically and it does not give one listing of a word with all of that word's meanings after it. Instead, it breaks words down by their various shades of meaning. It then groups all of those entries together and organizes them by topics and sub-topics. It shows the nuances in word meanings and explains difficult expressions and idiomatic usages of words, and even provides advice on how words might be translated under various conditions. Since it groups words by meanings, it shows distinctions in meaning between similar words, and also between differences in one word's meaning in different contexts, as well as showing the overlaps between word meanings.

George Miller, working at Princeton University in the 1980's through early 2000 took the concept of semantic grouping of words and applied it to Wordnet, the predecessor of Words R Us. While the work on an English Wordnet continues, the concept of a Wordnet has proven effective in forming the basis of modern machine translation of languages. Today Wordnets are available or under development in many languages of the world.

Logos for Us brings together languages by word meanings in a way that transcends the traditional approach of translating the Bible, then having to teach it's concepts to a new culture. This new paradign is unique, as you will see as you explore its use for Bible study. By marrying Strong's numbering system with Easton's Bible Dictionary and other tools, Logos for Us presents an exciting and extraordinary tool for Bible Study.

Logos for Us brings Strong's numbering system and Wordnet's numbering system together, opening up an amazing opportunity for both multi-lingual word studies and Bible study. Since the majority of the world languages, numbering over 8,000 have some portion of the Bible available in their language, we are now able to present a content rich method of Bible study and language learning, not available previously.

We invite you to explore Words R Us and Logos for Us. Imagine with us the possibilities!