Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript

Luke Lindemann, Claire Bowern, 2021.

Measures character entropy across a large set of modern and historical texts to give reference values for the Voynich text, whose conditional character entropy proves unusually low.

Voynich ManuscriptPreprintChecked against the original0

What it's used for here

The book cites it with Bowern and Lindemann 2021 for Voynichese character entropy falling below all 250 languages compared, and five methods surveys cite it as the standard entropy measurement; it was also in the withdrawn March 2026 draft.

Cited by on this site 7 records

Reading Without a Key

The book, version 2.0

SRC

Toward a Reading of the Voynich Manuscript

The March 2026 draft

SRC

5 methods surveys

Signal processing, cryptanalysis, mathematics, linguistics, inductive methods

SRC

Cite it

Lindemann, L., & Bowern, C. (2021). Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript.

@misc{lindemann2021,
  author = {Lindemann, Luke and Bowern, Claire},
  title = {Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript},
  year = {2021}
}

TY  - ELEC
TI  - Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript
AU  - Lindemann, Luke
AU  - Bowern, Claire
PY  - 2021
ER  -

Lindemann, Luke and Claire Bowern. “Character entropy in modern and historical texts: comparison metrics for an undeciphered manuscript.” 2021.