1. The key number under each noun, verb, adjective, or adverb identifies the Greek word for which that English word is a translation. This number is that assigned by James Strong in his “Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament: found in the appendix to his Exahustive Concordance of the Bible.

2. That number will allow you in seconds to  look up the Greek word in The word Study Concordance, and there find out all the other occurrences of that Greek word in the New Testament. You may also locate that same key number in the “Key Number Index to Standard Reference Works” at the back of The Word Study New Testament, which will lead you to where that Greek Word is discussed in Moulton and Geden’s Concordance of the Greek New Testament, Arndt and Gingrich’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and the multi-volume A Theological Dicionary of the New Testament by Kittel

3. Dots following a number (see figure above) merely indicate that the sense of the Greek word includes more than the single English word under which that number occures.

Step 1. See the figure above that came from Matthew 5:13. The word salt has been given the key number 217 by James Strong in the “Concise dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament” and can be found in his Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.

Step 2. Using The Word Study Concordance, the word salt can be found on page 225 under the key number 217, which is the first number on the left (see figure below).

At the top, the first number (217) is the key number assigned by James Strong. The second number (8) gives the number of occurrences (or the frequency) of that Greek word in the New Testament. The third number (34/40) refers to the pages where the word is discussed in Arndt and Gingrich (editions before 1979) and (after the slash) in Moulton and Geden. The Key Number index found on 823 (in The Word Study New Testament) has been updated to give the new page numbers for the 1979 edition of the Arndt and gingrich Lexicon. The fourth number (1:228) gives the volume and page number where Kittel treats the word (e.g., 1:228=Volume 1, page 228).