Why are some words in the King James Bible written in italics? When reading the King James Bible, I've noticed that some words are marked with italics. I have yet to discover any pattern, but it seems that all of the marked words are short common English words.

Why is this?
This is a sign of honesty on the translators' part.  The italicized words are interpolations, words that were not in the original documents but were added to the English text.  Many of them are there to make things make better grammatical sense in English, but a few of them can actually change the meanings of the passages, so they ought to be examined critically when you run across them.