The KJV commonly read today

The KJV commonly read today is substantially the 1769 Oxford edition (edited by Benjamin Blayney), not the original 1611 text.

Why revision was needed

The 1611 KJV was printed with 17th-century conventions that made it increasingly hard to read and inconsistent even by the printing standards of its own day:

• Inconsistent spelling and capitalization (the same word spelled multiple ways across the text)
• Black-letter (Gothic) typeface in the original printing
• Roman "u/v" and "i/j" used interchangeably rather than as distinct letters
• No system of italics yet standardized for words added by translators but not present in the original languages
• A number of printing errors, some notorious (the 1631 "Wicked Bible" famously omitted "not" from "Thou shalt not commit adultery")

Key revisions along the way

1. 1629 and 1638 (Cambridge) — early corrections of printing errors and some standardization, done by Cambridge scholars including original KJV translators John Bois and Samuel Ward.
2. 1762 (Cambridge, F. S. Parris) — a substantial revision effort updating spelling, punctuation, and italics.
3. 1769 (Oxford, Benjamin Blayney) — the big one. Blayney thoroughly revised spelling and punctuation to contemporary standards, standardized and expanded the italicization of supplied words, updated some archaic word forms, corrected marginal notes and cross-references, and cleaned up accumulated printing errors. This became the standard text.

So the "1769 edition" isn't a new translation — it's an orthographic and typographic overhaul of the same underlying 1611 translation work, done to fix errors and modernize presentation. The translational substance (word choices, underlying Hebrew/Greek text used) is essentially unchanged; what changed is spelling, punctuation, typography, and italics.

Relevance to KJV-Onlyism

This matters because most KJV-Only advocates in practice defend the 1769 text, not the 1611 original — which raises a question their critics often press: if textual precision and stability are the core argument, why is the "authoritative" text itself a revised edition rather than the original 1611 print? Confessional Bibliology advocates typically respond that the 1769 revision only touched orthography/typography, not translation substance, so it doesn't undermine their position — but it's a point of internal debate within KJV-Only circles too (Ruckmanites and some others do specifically insist on 1611 wording in disputed spots).