IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (well, sort of)

[proto57]

Overall, I don't think anagrams are an effective way of proving/verifying priority nowadays.

I don't think the practice was ever thought to be the best one available, even at the time. (Even before modern cryptography, one could easily have placed a wax-sealed clear text summary  of one's solution into the hands of an honest authority such as a judge or clergyman.)  It was basically the Renaissance version of a Provisional Patent, but I suspect it was always considered somewhat recreational.

Of course, in addition to claiming precedence, it was used to hide secrets for various other reasons. We all remember Roger Bacon using it to (supposedly) hide the formula and proportions for making gunpowder, with, "LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET", which was rearranged in 1904 to read, "R. VII PART. V NOV. CORUL. V ET SULPHURIS". According to AI (I was really going to remember all this??), this meant:

R. VII PART: Recipe VII partes (Take 7 parts of saltpeter).
V NOV. CORUL: V novellae coruli (5 parts of young hazel wood/charcoal).
V ET SULPHURIS: V et sulphuris (5 parts of sulphur).

Bacon used this cipher to protect the dangerous secret, which he described as creating "thunder and lightning"

I referenced this in my 2025 post, "Pitfalls of Decipherment": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

... along with Newbold's famous failure with anagram attempts:

3) Anagrams: Similar to the above, if any string of plain text results needs to be reordered to derive meaning, the chance are the derived meaning is purely speculative on the part of the decipherer. It is true that anagrams have historically been used to hide information, but rarely used to hide it in a way that another person could readily derive the meaning without help. This is a common misconception about various historic uses of anagrams, such as those by Roger Bacon and Galileo. They were using anagrams to insert a “watermark” of sorts in the test, so that they could later reveal that they were privy to some knowledge, so that they could later claim precedence to that knowledge, but without revealing it to unwanted eyes. But the purpose was not for another party to discern the meaning on their own, as it needed help from the creator to find it.

But if for whatever reason anagrams might be suspected, after only a few characters the possible translations quickly rises beyond any sensible use of hiding plain text, since many alternate plain texts can be derived from even short strings of plaintext characters. This means it becomes purely subjective, and almost from the start of the process. This was one of the pitfalls that William Romaine Newbold fell into, when attempting to decipher the Voynich Manuscript cipher text.  He derived long strings of characters, from which he, or really anyone, could assemble some resemblance of meaningful text. Newbold was assuming Roger Bacon content, however, and so he manipulated his anagrams until he found it.

Basically, anagrams were used to protect information, for either claims of propriety secrets (as pointed out often in this thread), or to protect information dangerous to the writer, or to the public, and so on. But as a means to hide information with ANY hope that it could later be found by another party, no, and more and greater "no" the longer they get.