Messages hidden in plain sight, in words, invisible characters, pixels, sound, printed dots, stacked transparencies, DNA and the bytes of files, and the analyses that find them.
Acrostic Search
Finds words spelled down the first or last letters of lines in Virgil, Aratus, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and First Folio, the Hebrew Bible or your text, each count beside chance: its letters’ shares among the line initials, the lines shuffled, every word of the text’s own vocabulary. Booth’s Baconian “string cipher” (1909) is run by his rules over every passage of the Folio. Test cases: Virgil’s MARS, Aratus’s ΛΕΠΤΗ, Psalm 119.
Terms
About this tool
History
Hebrew poets ran Psalm 119, Proverbs 31 and Lamentations through the alphabet verse by verse. Greek and Latin poets hid words: Jacques read ΛΕΠΤΗ down Aratus’s Phaenomena 783–787 (1960), the first of the lines opening with λεπτή; Fowler read MARS down Aeneid 7.601–604 (1983). Booth (1909) found Bacon’s name along a “string” of Shakespeare’s lines. The Friedmans answered with arithmetic (1955): a word turns up as often as its letters’ shares, multiplied, times the places it could stand — and they found their own name by Booth’s rules.
How it works
A line’s first (or last) letter is read as its alphabet reads it — I with J, U with V, Greek without accents, Hebrew finals as their letters. A word running down consecutive lines stands beside the places times the product of its letters’ shares, the chance of as many or more, and its count in shuffled lines; with nothing looked for, every word of the text’s own vocabulary is counted. The alphabet view finds runs of verses through the alphabet, one letter missing and one pair exchanged at most. Booth’s string reads a passage in alternate directions from a corner, each letter of the name at its next place, ending on the opposite corner.
How it was checked
The tests reproduce Robinson’s counts for Virgil (2019) within 0.3%, and SSSS down the last letters within 3; find MARS once and ΛΕΠΤΗ at 783; count 196 places for Virgil’s own words where chance gives 186; find seven runs through the alphabet and none past five letters in shuffled verses; and give Booth’s FRANCISCO and BACONO on the Epilogue word for word, the Friedmans’ BEN JONSON and FRIEDMAN, and, over the Folio’s 3,402 passages, BACON 49 times against DONNE’s 86.
Limits
The Folio gives its verse only, numbered within each scene; prose is reflowed in the transcription and left out. Virgil is Greenough’s text, Robinson’s another edition. Only consecutive lines are read, so Virgil’s name on alternate lines of Georgics 1.429–433 is not searched. The alphabet rule misses Psalms 9–10, 25, 37, 111, 112 and 145. Booth’s halves keyed on a shared letter, and his capitals, are not offered. A count says how surprising a find is, not what a poet meant.
- Matthew Robinson, “Looking for Vergilian acrostics: a statistical approach”, Materiali e Discussioni 82 (2019), pp. 23–73 — preprint
- Don Fowler, “An Acrostic in Vergil (Aeneid 7.601–4)?”, Classical Quarterly 33 (1983), p. 298
- William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman, The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare (typescript, 1955), ch. VI–VII
- William Stone Booth, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), ch. IV and specimens C–D, pp. 35–61