More than a century after Wilfrid Voynich carried his "ugly duckling" manuscript out of a Jesuit collection near Rome, the fundamental question about the book still hasn't been settled: what actually is it? A real language nobody has ever encountered before? A cipher hiding a known one? An elaborate, centuries-old con? Researchers, linguists, cryptographers, and more than a few overconfident amateurs have staked their reputations on an answer. Here's what each major theory actually claims, and how well it survives contact with the evidence covered so far in this series.
Could the Voynich Manuscript Be Written in a Genuine Unknown Language?
This is the theory with the strongest statistical backing and, frustratingly, the least practical progress behind it. As covered in Part 2, the manuscript's word frequencies follow Zipf's Law, a mathematical pattern found in every known natural language and rarely produced by accident. Its internal grammar-like structure, consistent word lengths, positional rules for where certain characters appear within a word, behaves the way real written language behaves.
The trouble is that "behaves like a language" and "identifiable as a specific language" are two very different claims. No linguist has ever matched Voynichese's vocabulary, structure, or grammar to any known language, living or dead, despite comparisons to dozens of candidates including Hebrew, Latin, Chinese dialects, and various Romance languages. One recent academic proposal has even argued for a connection to Pahlavi, the extinct Middle Persian script, based on similarities in how words are constructed, a theory that, like nearly every other in this category, remains unverified and contested. If it's a real language, it may simply be one that left no other written trace anywhere in the historical record, which would make the Voynich Manuscript not just a mystery, but possibly the only surviving example of an entire lost tongue.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a Cipher for a Known Language?
This theory takes a different angle: the underlying language might be perfectly ordinary, the encoding is what's strange. Several major claimed "solutions" have followed this path, and all of them have run into the same wall.
In 2019, University of Bristol researcher Gerard Cheshire announced he'd identified the text as an extinct "proto-Romance" language, claiming the manuscript covered everything from herbal medicine to relationship advice. The University pulled its own press release within days after other linguists picked the methodology apart, arguing Cheshire had assigned meanings to symbols without any consistent underlying rule, making the results effectively unfalsifiable.
In 2017, television researcher Nicholas Gibbs made a similar splash, arguing the script was a system of Latin ligatures, scribal shorthand symbols, similar to how the ampersand quietly represents the Latin word for "and." Gibbs concluded the manuscript was a women's health manual, likely compiled from earlier medical texts for a wealthy patron. It's a theory that fits the manuscript's illustrations surprisingly well, plants, tubular bathing structures, and possible anatomical imagery are all consistent with medieval gynecological texts like the Trotula. But medievalists quickly found the same fatal flaw as Cheshire's theory: when scholars tried applying Gibbs's proposed translation key to actual passages, the resulting Latin didn't hold together grammatically.
The most credible cipher-based work hasn't claimed a solution at all. A 2025 study published in the journal Cryptologia introduced a hand-executable substitution cipher, nicknamed "Naibbe," capable of turning ordinary Latin or Italian text into ciphertext that statistically resembles real Voynichese, without needing any tools beyond what a 15th-century scribe would have had. The researchers were careful to frame this as a benchmark showing what's technically possible, not proof of what the manuscript actually is.
Could the Voynich Manuscript Be a Hoax?
The hoax theory actually splits into two very different versions, and they don't hold up equally well.
The first version holds that Wilfrid Voynich fabricated the manuscript himself, sometime in the years before he "discovered" it, in order to sell it for a substantial profit. It's a theory with an obvious motive, Voynich did try to sell the book for roughly $100,000, but it runs directly into the physical evidence. As established in Part 1, radiocarbon dating places the vellum's creation between 1404 and 1438, and creating a modern forgery would have required Voynich to source authentic, untouched 15th-century parchment on a scale of over a hundred pages, along with ink chemically consistent with medieval practices, then somehow disguise all of it convincingly enough to fool forensic examiners a century later. Researchers who've studied Voynich's own correspondence have also found no evidence he understood the manuscript's contents any better than anyone else, his confusion, by most accounts, looks genuine rather than performed.
The second version is more serious: that the manuscript is a genuine medieval hoax, produced by an anonymous scribe to sell to a wealthy, credulous buyer, without containing any real meaning at all. Researcher Gordon Rugg has spent years demonstrating exactly how this could have worked, using a method involving a table of syllables and a physical grille, a card with cut-out holes that, when shifted across the table in different positions, mechanically generates Voynichese-looking words. Rugg has shown this method can even reproduce some of the text's more advanced statistical quirks, including some conformity to Zipf's Law, without the hoaxer needing to understand a word of what they were producing.
Even so, most researchers find the full hoax theory difficult to accept at face value, simply due to scale: producing over two hundred pages of carefully planned, internally consistent illustrations and glyph patterns, spread across five scribal hands, represents an enormous investment of time and expensive material for a scheme with no guarantee of finding a buyer.
What About the Wilder Theories?
No manuscript this famous escapes without a few fringe explanations attached to it. Over the decades, the Voynich Manuscript has been proposed as a guide to the philosopher's stone, the work of a stranded extraterrestrial, and occasionally, evidence of a lost, pre-catastrophe civilization. None of these carry meaningful evidentiary support, and serious researchers in the field generally treat them as internet-era curiosities rather than credible avenues of investigation. They're worth knowing about mainly because they illustrate just how much interpretive room a genuinely unsolved 600-year-old mystery can generate.
Weighing the Evidence
Of every theory covered in this chapter, two currently hold the most credibility among researchers who study the manuscript seriously: that it represents a genuine, otherwise-lost natural language, and that it's a sophisticated cipher built on a known language using a method not yet identified. Both are consistent with the statistical evidence showing Zipf's Law and language-like entropy patterns; neither has produced anything close to a verified, peer-reviewed translation.
The medieval hoax theory remains a real possibility that can't be ruled out, particularly given how convincingly Rugg's grille method reproduces the text's statistical fingerprint, but it struggles against the sheer scale and apparent care involved in the manuscript's production. The modern forgery theory, meanwhile, is about as close to settled as anything in this case gets: the radiocarbon evidence alone makes it exceptionally difficult to sustain.
What's left, six centuries on, is a document that keeps behaving exactly like something with real meaning, while stubbornly refusing to let anyone find out what that meaning actually is.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the leading theory about what the Voynich Manuscript actually is? No single theory has scholarly consensus. The two most credible possibilities are that it's a genuine natural language with no other surviving examples, or a sophisticated cipher encoding a known language using a method that hasn't yet been identified.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a hoax? It's possible, but disputed. A medieval hoax, produced mechanically using a grille-and-table method, could replicate some of the text's statistical patterns. Most researchers find this unlikely given the manuscript's scale, but it hasn't been ruled out.
Did Wilfrid Voynich fake the manuscript himself? This theory has circulated for decades but is considered highly unlikely. Radiocarbon dating places the vellum's creation between 1404 and 1438, meaning Voynich would have needed genuine centuries-old parchment and period-accurate ink to pull it off.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a women's health manual? This was proposed by researcher Nicholas Gibbs in 2017, based on the manuscript's bathing and botanical illustrations. His claimed Latin translation key was quickly challenged by medievalists, who found it didn't produce grammatically coherent Latin.
Has anyone proven the Voynich Manuscript is a real language? Not conclusively. Statistical analysis shows the text follows patterns found in real languages, including Zipf's Law, which supports the theory. However, no specific language has ever been successfully matched to its vocabulary or grammar.
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