"Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast" (1 Chronicles 4:10): modern readers picture Jabez asking for more beachfront, not more territory.

When Jabez prays "enlarge my coast" in 1 Chronicles 4:10, a modern reader pictures him asking for beachfront property. But Jabez's territory in Judah was interior land, nowhere near the Mediterranean. In the KJV, "coast" regularly translates Hebrew and Greek words for border or territory, not shoreline: you see the same usage in phrases like "the coasts of Judaea" and "the coasts of Tyre and Sidon," all of which are about a boundary line on a map, not a beach.

The word drifted the normal way English words do: "coast" comes from Latin costa, "side" or "edge," and originally meant the edge of anything, a country's edge included. English later narrowed it to mean specifically the edge that meets the sea, leaving the KJV's older, broader sense stranded for modern readers.