The World English Bible exists because of a copyright problem. In 1994 Michael Paul Johnson, an engineer translating scripture in the hours a full-time job left over, worked out how long it would take him to finish a modern English Bible that anyone could copy freely, and did not like the answer. He stopped translating from scratch and began again from the American Standard Version of 1901 — accurate, respected, and, unlike the King James Version (still encumbered in England and Wales by the Crown's letters patent), wholly out of copyright. A program he wrote himself went through the ASV looking for words no modern Bible used, proposed replacements, and made the substitutions in about fifteen minutes. Everything the program could not do — word order, punctuation, quotation marks — was done by hand over the following years, and the text was published, and republished in revisions, from 1997 onward.
Two things separate it from the edition it revises. The first is the Greek. The ASV's New Testament followed the revisers' critical text, close to what would become the Nestle-Aland edition; the World English Bible was conformed instead to the Byzantine Majority Text, so it is neither its parent's text nor the Textus Receptus the King James translators used. The second is the divine name. The ASV printed “Jehovah”; the World English Bible prints “Yahweh”, with a footnote at Genesis 2:4 explaining the choice to a reader who expects “the LORD”. The British edition goes back to “LORD” — the copy in this corpus is the American one, so “Yahweh” is what you read. Beyond those two decisions it stays a formal-equivalence translation in its parent's manner: the same close tracking of Hebrew and Greek word order, in spelling and grammar that no longer need a gloss.
In the reader it is a leaf, and the only one on the corpus's longest branch. Open a rung beneath a World English Bible verse and the American Standard Version appears under it, and beneath that the Revised Version, the King James Version and the Geneva Bible, down to the original-language floor marked with ≈. Nothing in the corpus stands on the World English Bible in turn. It is also the widest text on that branch: the American Standard Version had no Apocrypha, so the World English Bible's were made separately, from the King James Apocrypha and Brenton's English Septuagint, and our copy carries eighty books where the ASV beneath it carries sixty-six — among them 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151, which the King James Apocrypha does not have. Baruch, which it does have, is missing from our copy. The About page leaves this edition's year column blank, and rightly: there is no single edition date to print. The corpus stamps 2000 so that the rung chips have something to sort by.