Riddles

What it's for

A collection of classic riddles to train the mind and have fun with family or friends. Read the riddle, think a bit, then reveal the answer.

Tip

Perfect for kids, parties, trips and waiting moments. Try making up new ones based on these!

How a riddle is built

Nearly all of them work the same way: they describe one thing in words that make you think of another, exploiting a double meaning or a metaphor the listener takes literally. «It has teeth but does not bite» works because the word teeth calls up a mouth, and the answer is a comb.

The mechanism is called misdirection, and its elegance lies in the fact that all the information is true: no well-made riddle lies. Whoever solves it does not uncover a hidden fact, they change the way they read what was already in front of them, which is why the answer, once said, seems obvious.

Why the answer comes when you stop looking for it

It is a phenomenon known in psychology as fixation: having interpreted «teeth» as part of a mouth, the brain keeps searching in that direction and cannot let it go. The answer nearly always arrives after a pause, when the wrong interpretation has weakened.

Hence the practical advice for a family evening: do not give the answer straight away, but leave the riddle hanging and come back to it ten minutes later. It is also why children sometimes solve them before adults: they have fewer settled interpretations to abandon.

They are older than almost everything

The riddle is one of the oldest genres known: they appear on Sumerian tablets four thousand years old, in Egyptian papyri, in the Bible, in the Norse Edda and in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, where one codex collects almost a hundred. And there is the Sphinx's riddle, perhaps the most famous story in which a wrong answer costs a life.

In Italian the first text considered to be in the vernacular, the Veronese Riddle of the eighth or ninth century, is itself a riddle: it describes a scribe sowing on a white field with a white plough. It is a coincidence that says something about the genre: playing with double meanings is one of the first things people do with a new language.

How to invent a riddle that works

You start from the answer, not from the question. You list the object's characteristics and look for the one that, put into the right words, calls up something else. Then you add one or two true details that reinforce the wrong interpretation, and one that contradicts it, which is what makes solving possible.

The rule that separates a good riddle from a frustrating one is that the answer, once said, must make people say «that was obvious». If an explanation is needed, the riddle does not work: it means the link between description and object was too weak to be found.

Nearby tools

For other games to play in company there are Would you rather, Jokes and General knowledge quiz. For words Guess the word and Anagram generator.