What Is In the Voynich Manuscript?

By Dig Labs Contributors

Source: Dig Labs Project

Our investigation utilizes AI and statistical linguistics to search for hidden structures and grammatical patterns within the text.

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Note to reader:
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.

Join Our Collaborative Research

Dig Labs Collaborative ResearchHelp us investigate these questions further. Review the current state of research surrounding this topic, suggest new sources, or share your expertise. Every contribution helps.

“What Is In the Voynich Manuscript?” by Dig Labs Contributors is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.Last edited: July 9, 2026

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Introduction

The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century codex written in an unknown script and illustrated with plants and celestial maps that do not exist in the natural world. Despite a century of effort by cryptographers and linguists, the text remains undeciphered, leading to theories ranging from a complex hoax to a lost botanical manual. Its carbon-dating confirms it as an authentic artifact from the medieval period.

Our investigation utilizes AI and statistical linguistics to search for hidden structures and grammatical patterns within the text. We are bringing together the research on the world's most mysterious book and following the leads of medieval cryptography.