Beinecke MS 408 · independent examination
Voynich Text Examination

What the text of the Voynich manuscript is like, measured on the page scans and on full transcriptions, and compared with real writing in thirty-one languages.

Works referred to

The 104 works cited are listed in alphabetical order. A preprint is a paper posted before other experts have checked it. The preprints among the 104 are marked as such. Every claim on the site that rests on a work is attributed to it where the claim is made. Four of the works are preprints that cover part of the same ground. They are from 2025 and 2026. Three are by Parisel. One is by Rozanova and Temerev. The page ‘Compared with published work’ says which published claims do not hold up and why.

This list gives the sources named in this report, in alphabetical order, and it marks the preprints that have not been peer reviewed. Where only an abstract was available, the entry says so. The web pages of René Zandbergen's site voynich.nu are undated, so the list puts them under his name.

  1. Altmann, G. (1980). Prolegomena to Menzerath's law. Glottometrika 2: 1-10.
  2. Amancio, D. R., Altmann, E. G., Rybski, D., Oliveira, O. N. and Costa, L. da F. (2013). Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich manuscript. PLoS ONE 8(7): e67310. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067310
  3. Arutyunov, A., Borisov, L., Fedorov, S., Ivchenko, A., Kirina-Lilinskaya, E., Orlov, Yu., Osipov, K., Pyrkov, A., Shilin, S. and Zeniuk, D. (2016). Statistical properties of European languages and Voynich manuscript analysis. arXiv preprint 1611.09122. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09122
  4. Aspect Research (2026). voynich-autoexploration: canonical methodology and ledger of findings of an automated exploration. GitHub repository (unreviewed). github.com/Aspect-Research/voynich-autoexploration
  5. Benjamini, Y. and Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B 57(1): 289-300.
  6. Bennett, W. R. (1976). Scientific and Engineering Problem-Solving with the Computer. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall (chapter on the entropy of the Voynich text).
  7. Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y. and Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3: 993-1022.
  8. Bolte, J. (1903). Zur Geschichte der Losbücher. In Georg Wickrams Werke, vol. 4 (Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 230), 276-348. Tübingen.
  9. Bowern, C. and Lindemann, L. (2021). The linguistics of the Voynich manuscript. Annual Review of Linguistics 7: 285-308. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613
  10. Boxer, A. (2022). Fingerprinting gibberish: a quantitative comparison of the Voynich and Sloane MS 3188. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313 (International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022, University of Malta), paper 1. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper1.pdf
  11. Cham, B. (2014). The curve-line system. Blog post, 17 December 2014. https://briancham1994.com/2014/12/17/curve-line-system/
  12. Chao, A. and Shen, T.-J. (2003). Nonparametric estimation of Shannon's index of diversity when there are unseen species in sample. Environmental and Ecological Statistics 10(4): 429-443.
  13. Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  14. Currier, P. (1976). Some important new statistical findings. Seminar paper (print; consulted here through the summaries and reconstructions at voynich.nu).
  15. D'Imperio, M. E. (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency (chapter on cipher possibilities).
  16. Daruka, I. (2021). On the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 45(1): 44-80. doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2019.1706063
  17. de Arruda, H. F., Marinho, V. Q., Costa, L. da F. and Amancio, D. R. (2018). Paragraph-based complex networks: application to document classification and authenticity verification. arXiv preprint 1806.08467 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08467
  18. Edwards, R. (2025a). Voynich reconsidered: scribes and languages. Medium, 7 February 2025 (self-published). medium.com
  19. Edwards, R. (2025b). Voynich reconsidered: abbreviated Latin revisited. Medium (self-published). medium.com
  20. Fagin Davis, L. (2020). How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript. Manuscript Studies 5(1): 164-180. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341283247
  21. Fagin Davis, L. (2025). Voynich codicology. Manuscript Road Trip blog, 19 January 2025. https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2025/01/19/voynich-codicology/
  22. Farrugia, K., Layfield, C. and van der Plas, L. (2022). Demystifying the scribes behind the Voynich manuscript using computational linguistic techniques. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 5. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper5.pdf
  23. Feaster, P. (2022). Rightward and downward grapheme distributions in the Voynich manuscript. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 12. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper12.pdf
  24. Franklin, J. M., Schneeweiss, S., Polinski, J. M. and Rassen, J. A. (2014). Plasmode simulation for the evaluation of pharmacoepidemiologic methods in complex healthcare databases. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 72, 219–226. doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2013.10.018
  25. Friedman, W. F. and Callimahos, L. D. (1959). Military Cryptanalytics, Part I. National Security Agency; reprinted Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, 1985.
  26. Gaskell, D. and Bowern, C. (2022). Gibberish after all? Voynichese is statistically similar to human-produced samples of meaningless text. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 4. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper4.pdf
  27. Grassberger, P. (2003). Entropy estimates from insufficient samplings. arXiv:physics/0307138.
  28. Gregory, C. R. (1885). Les cahiers des manuscrits grecs. Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 29(3): 261-268.
  29. Greshko, M. A. (2025). The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext. Cryptologia (published online 2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408
  30. Guy, J. B. M. (1991). Statistical properties of two folios of the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 15(3): 207-218; and Vowel identification: an old (but good) algorithm. Cryptologia 15(3): 258-262.
  31. Hauer, B. and Kondrak, G. (2016). Decoding anagrammed texts written in an unknown language and script. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 4: 75-86. https://aclanthology.org/Q16-1006/
  32. Hermes, J. (2022). Polygraphia III: the cipher that pretends to be an artificial language. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 7. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper7.pdf
  33. Holm, S. (1979). A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 6(2): 65-70.
  34. JB (2010, 2011, 2016). Computational Attacks on the Voynich Manuscript: posts on labels. Blog (self-published). voynichattacks.wordpress.com
  35. Kaspar, F. and Schuster, H. G. (1987). Easily calculable measure for the complexity of spatiotemporal patterns. Phys. Rev. A 36(2): 842-848.
  36. Knight, K., Megyesi, B. and Schaefer, C. (2011). The Copiale cipher. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, ACL 2011: 2-9. https://aclanthology.org/W11-1202.pdf
  37. Kober, A. E. (1948). The Minoan scripts: fact and theory. American Journal of Archaeology 52(1): 82-103 (known here through secondary accounts, chiefly Ventris and Chadwick 1956 and later overviews).
  38. Kuhn, R. and De Mori, R. (1990). A cache-based natural language model for speech recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 12(6), 570–583.
  39. Kullback, S. (1938). Statistical Methods in Cryptanalysis. War Department, Washington; reprinted Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, 1976.
  40. Landini, G. (2001). Evidence of linguistic structure in the Voynich manuscript using spectral analysis. Cryptologia 25(4): 275-295 (abstract consulted; full text paywalled). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161-110191889932
  41. Layfield, C., van der Plas, L., Rosner, M. and Abela, J. (2020). Word probability findings in the Voynich manuscript. Proceedings of LT4HALA at LREC 2020. https://aclanthology.org/2020.lt4hala-1.11.pdf
  42. Ledoit, O. and Wolf, M. (2004). A well-conditioned estimator for large-dimensional covariance matrices. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 88(2): 365-411.
  43. Lehofer, A. (2022). Applying hierarchical clustering to homophonic substitution ciphers using historical corpora. Cryptologia 46(5): 422-438 (abstract consulted; full text paywalled). https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2021.1918801
  44. Lindemann, L. (2022). Crux of the MATTR: Voynichese morphological complexity. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022, CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 9. ceur-ws.org
  45. Lindemann, L. and Bowern, C. (2021). Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript. arXiv preprint 2010.14697 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14697
  46. Luo, J., Hartmann, F., Santus, E., Barzilay, R. and Cao, Y. (2021). Deciphering undersegmented ancient scripts using phonetic prior. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 9: 69-81. https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.5/
  47. Matlach, V., Janeckova, B. A. and Dostal, D. (2022). The Voynich manuscript: symbol roles revisited. PLoS ONE 17(1): e0260948. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0260948
  48. Montemurro, M. A. and Zanette, D. H. (2013). Keywords and co-occurrence patterns in the Voynich manuscript: an information-theoretic analysis. PLoS ONE 8(6): e66344. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066344
  49. Nosek, B. A., Ebersole, C. R., DeHaven, A. C. and Mellor, D. T. (2018). The preregistration revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(11), 2600–2606. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708274114
  50. Nuhn, M. and Knight, K. (2014). Cipher type detection. Proceedings of EMNLP 2014. https://aclanthology.org/D14-1185/
  51. Painter, K. and Bowern, C. (2022). Examining the history of Voynich glyphs using phylogenetic methods. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 11. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper11.pdf
  52. Parisel, C. (2025). Directionality of the Voynich script. arXiv preprint 2509.10573 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10573
  53. Parisel, C. (2026). A quantitative confirmation of the Currier language distinction. arXiv preprint 2604.25979 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25979
  54. Parisel, C. (2026). Evidence of layered positional and directional constraints in the Voynich manuscript. arXiv preprint 2604.19762 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19762
  55. Pelling, N. (2017). Voynich labelese. Cipher Mysteries, 3 September 2017. https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/09/03/voynich-labelese
  56. Pelling, N. (2020, 2025). The Neal keys: posts on paired single-leg gallows. Cipher Mysteries, 29 August 2020 and 12 July 2025. https://ciphermysteries.com/
  57. Pelling, N. (2022). Voynich manuscript: Q20 (in-)homogeneity and BAAFU. Cipher Mysteries, 30 December 2022. ciphermysteries.com
  58. Perone, C. S. (2016). Voynich manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns. Blog post, January 2016. https://blog.christianperone.com/2016/01/voynich-manuscript-word-vectors-and-t-sne-visualization-of-some-patterns/
  59. Piantadosi, S. T., Tily, H. and Gibson, E. (2011). Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(9): 3526-3529. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1012551108
  60. Politis, D. N. and Romano, J. P. (1994). Large sample confidence regions based on subsamples under minimal assumptions. Annals of Statistics 22(4), 2031–2050. doi.org/10.1214/aos/1176325770
  61. Popović, M., Dhali, M. A. and Schomaker, L. (2021). Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). PLoS ONE 16(4): e0249769. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249769
  62. Reddy, S. and Knight, K. (2011). What we know about the Voynich manuscript. Proceedings of LaTeCH at ACL 2011. https://aclanthology.org/W11-1511/
  63. Reeds, J. (1998). Solved: the ciphers in Book III of Trithemius's Steganographia. Cryptologia 22(4): 291-317.
  64. Reeds, J. (2006). John Dee and the magic tables in the Book of Soyga. In S. Clucas (ed.), John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought, Springer, Dordrecht: 177-204.
  65. Rozanova, L. and Temerev, A. (2026). A glyph is not a letter, a token is not a word, a space is not a space: what the units of Voynichese are not. arXiv preprint 2608.17096 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17096
  66. Rugg, G. (2004). An elegant hoax? A possible solution to the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 28(1): 31-46 (abstract consulted; full text paywalled). https://doi.org/10.1080/0161-110491892755
  67. Rugg, G. and Taylor, G. (2017). Hoaxing statistical features of the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 41(3): 247-268 (abstract consulted; full text paywalled). https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2016.1206753
  68. Schinner, A. (2007). The Voynich manuscript: evidence of the hoax hypothesis. Cryptologia 31(2): 95-107 (abstract consulted; full text paywalled). https://doi.org/10.1080/01611190601133539
  69. Shannon, C. E. (1949). Communication theory of secrecy systems. Bell System Technical Journal 28(4): 656-715.
  70. Sherwood, E. (n.d.). Voynich botanical plants: identifications of the herbal folios. edithsherwood.com/voynich_botanical_plants (used only for the folio-to-plant identifications).
  71. Smith, E. M. (2015). Linestart words. Agnostic Voynich blog, 29 March 2015. https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/linefirst-words/
  72. Smith, E. M. (2019). Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 43(6). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2019.1596998
  73. Sproat, R. (2014). A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems. Language 90(2): 457-481 (article paywalled, abstract consulted; the open supplement and corpora were used). https://richardsproat.com/data/non-linguistic-symbols/
  74. Stafford, J. (2022). Seven habits of highly eccentric paragraphs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 13. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper13.pdf
  75. Stallings, D. (1998). Understanding the second-order entropies of Voynich text. ixoloxi.com
  76. Steckley, A. and Steckley, N. (2024). Subtle signs of scribal intent in the Voynich manuscript. arXiv preprint 2404.13069 (unreviewed). arxiv.org/abs/2404.13069
  77. Steinmeyer, E. and Sievers, E. (1895). Die althochdeutschen Glossen, vol. III. Weidmann, Berlin (the Lingua Ignota glossary of Hildegard of Bingen at 390-404).
  78. Sterneck, R., Polish, A. and Bowern, C. (2021). Topic modeling in the Voynich manuscript. arXiv preprint 2107.02858 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.02858
  79. Stolfi, J. (1997-2000). Prefix-midfix-suffix decomposition and the crust-mantle-core grammar for Voynichese words. Voynich pages. https://www.voynich.nu/hist/stolfi/grammar.html
  80. Stolfi, J. (2002). Chinese theory redux. Voynich pages, 18 January 2002. https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/02-01-18-chinese-redux/
  81. Storn, R. and Price, K. (1997). Differential evolution: a simple and efficient heuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces. Journal of Global Optimization 11(4): 341-359.
  82. Székely, G. J. and Rizzo, M. L. (2004). Testing for equal distributions in high dimension. InterStat, November 2004.
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  84. Tiltman, J. H. (1967). The Voynich manuscript: the most mysterious manuscript in the world. NSA Technical Journal 12(3) (declassified reprint).
  85. Timm, T. (2014, revised 2015). How the Voynich manuscript was created. arXiv preprint 1407.6639 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6639
  86. Timm, T. (2016). Co-occurrence patterns in the Voynich manuscript. arXiv preprint 1601.07435 (unreviewed). https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435
  87. Timm, T. and Schinner, A. (2020). A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia 44(1): 1-19. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01611194.2019.1596999
  88. Trithemius, J. (1606). Steganographia. Frankfurt; digital edition by J. H. Peterson, esotericarchives.com. esotericarchives.com/tritheim/stegano.htm
  89. Ventura, P. G. and Bosco, J. A. (2026). Voynich Metric Battery: protocol v0.3.5. GitHub repository (unreviewed). github.com/pablogventura/voynich-metric-battery
  90. Vogt, E. (2012). The line as a functional unit in the Voynich manuscript: some statistical observations. Self-published PDF. https://voynichthoughts.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/the_voynich_line.pdf
  91. Wallach, H. M., Murray, I., Salakhutdinov, R. and Mimno, D. (2009). Evaluation methods for topic models. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Machine Learning, 1105–1112. doi.org/10.1145/1553374.1553515
  92. Walsh, T. (2026). Shrinking the constraint envelope of the Voynich manuscript: a firewall-disciplined, self-correcting computational program. Preprint v7, 25 July 2026, DireLabs (unreviewed). github.com/DireLabs/ms408
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  94. Yoshida, K. (2026). Multiscale structural constraints in the Voynich manuscript: a falsifiable generative-modeling audit. 12 August 2026, GitHub repository (unreviewed). github.com/seeton/Voynich-public
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  96. Zandbergen, R. (2021). The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level. arXiv preprint 2104.12548 (unreviewed); also circulated at voynich.nu. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12548
  97. Zandbergen, R. (2022). Transliteration of the Voynich MS text. Keynote, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022, CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313. ceur-ws.org
  98. Zandbergen, R. (n.d.). From bigram entropy to word entropy in the Voynich MS. voynich.nu. http://www.voynich.nu/extra/wordent.html
  99. Zandbergen, R. (n.d.). Sentences, paragraphs and the absence of repeated phrases. voynich.nu. https://www.voynich.nu/a5_synt.html
  100. Zandbergen, R. (n.d.). The Currier languages revisited. voynich.nu. http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curabcd.html
  101. Zandbergen, R. (n.d.). The writing system, labels and the text. voynich.nu. https://voynich.nu/writing.html
  102. Zandbergen, R. (n.d.). What we learn from entropy. voynich.nu. https://www.voynich.nu/extra/sol_ent.html
  103. Zattera, M. (2022). A new transliteration alphabet brings new evidence of word structure and multiple "languages" in the Voynich manuscript. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-3313, paper 10. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper10.pdf
  104. Zelinka, I., Lara, L. P. de, Windsor, L. and Lozi, R. (2023). Softcomputing in identification of the origin of the Voynich manuscript by comparison with ancient dialects. Applied Soft Computing (2023); open copy at hal.science/hal-04572644v1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568494623002351