The Voynich manuscript, called after the antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, is a little book 23.5 x 16.2 cm of about 240 pages.

Almost every page of the book includes clinical and botanical illustrations in different tones of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

“The Voynich manuscript’s parchment was made in the early fifteenth century (1404-1438), and in its building and showed material, the manuscript looks like books made throughout the early 1400s in main Europe, particularly those from the area around the Alps,” Greshko stated.

“Three primary schools of idea have actually emerged on the nature of the manuscript:

(i) that it is worthless mumbo jumbo possibly produced as glossolalia or as a way of running a Medieval rip-off;

(ii) that it represents an early synthetic language, or possibly the written type of an odd or formerly unidentified natural language;

(iii) that it represents a ciphertext of a widely known natural language such as Latin, Italian, or German.”

In his brand-new work, Greshko explained a cipher that dependably secures Latin and Italian texts as decipherable ciphertexts that duplicate numerous residential or commercial properties of the Voynich manuscript simultaneously.

“Named after a 14th-century Italian word for a card video game, the Naibbe cipher is a verbose homophonic alternative cipher that maps private letters in a Latin or Italian plaintext onto numerous unique strings of Voynichese glyphs,” he discussed.

“The cipher is created to be executable with products readily available in or around the Alpine area throughout the early fifteenth century.”

“It works by mapping letters onto numerous unique strings of Voynichese glyphs, producing words that follow a broadened variation of the slot grammar observed in the manuscript itself.”

The outcomes recommend that the ciphertext hypothesis for the Voynich manuscript stays practical.

“Playing cards are likewise traditionally possible, having actually been presented to Europe in the late fourteenth century through trade with the Mamluk Sultanate,” the scientist stated.

“Decks of 52 and 78 playing cards are understood from 15th-century Europe, and validated records of playing cards within Italy go back to 1377, in the kind of a Florentine restriction on the foreign card video game naibbea term most likely originated from Arabic.”

“Playing cards are likewise understood from around the Alpine area particularly: Venice developed such a robust card-making market throughout the early fifteenth century that by 1441, Venetian craftsmens were currently regreting the market’s decrease.”

“I have actually developed 2 versions of the Naibbe cipher,” he included.

“One utilizes the 78-card tarocchi (tarot) deck, which was developed in 15th-century Italy to play trick-taking card video games.”

“The other alternative usages a basic 52-card deck, whose fundamental style was developed in the Mamluk Sultanate.”

The Naibbe cipher’s really presence recommends that the Voynich manuscript might work with being a Latin or Romance-language ciphertext.

“As far as I understand, the Naibbe cipher is the very first replacement cipher ever explained that has actually provided organized descriptions for how a replacement cipher might have customized the residential or commercial properties of Latin, Italian, [or] German into those of the Voynich manuscript,” Greshko stated.

“However, the Naibbe cipher’s insufficient duplication of Voynich B’s residential or commercial properties highlights the trouble of accomplishing a detailed cipher-based design for Voynich manuscript text generation.”

“I hope that the Naibbe cipher motivates brand-new computational analyses of both Voynich manuscript-mimic ciphers and the Voynich manuscript itself– which one day quickly, the low hum of the Voynich manuscript’s six-century secret and the cacophony of a century’s worth of analysis will pave the way to sweet-sounding consistency.”

The research study was released in November 2025 in the journal Cryptologia

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Michael A. Greshko. The Naibbe cipher: a replacement cipher that secures Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext. Cryptologiareleased online November 26, 2025; doi: 10.1080/ 01611194.2025.2566408