50 Fun Facts About Riddles and Brain Teasers

What was Oedipus's answer to the Sphinx's riddle of the four-, two- and three-footed creature?

A person crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick in old age.

In some accounts the Sphinx asked a second riddle: which two sisters each give birth to the other?

Day and night: each gives birth to the other in endless turn; both words are feminine in Greek, which makes them 'sisters'.

What did Samson's riddle 'Out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet' describe?

Honey in a lion's carcass: Samson had killed a lion and later found bees and honey in its body (Judges 14); the Philistines got the answer only by pressing his wife.

What was the answer to the riddle that probably became the nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty'?

The trick relied on 'humpty dumpty' also being 18th-century slang for a short, clumsy person, who might survive a fall where an egg would not.

In 'As I was going to St Ives', what is the usual trick answer to how many were going to St Ives?

Only the narrator is actually said to be heading there; the man and his entourage are simply met on the road.

If everyone in the St Ives rhyme, kits and all, were going to St Ives, how many would that be including the narrator?

2,802: the narrator, the man, 7 wives, 49 sacks, 343 cats and 2,401 kits add up to 2,802.

In Wonderland, what answer does the Hatter give to his own raven and writing-desk riddle?

He hasn't the slightest idea: in the book the Hatter admits 'I haven't the slightest idea'; Carroll only invented an answer in an 1896 preface, and Sam Loyd offered 'Poe wrote on both'.

In Turandot, what is Calaf's answer to the riddle 'born each night, dying each dawn'?

Hope: Calaf answers 'la speranza', the thing that is born each night and dies each dawn, and goes on to solve Turandot's remaining two riddles.

What answers Turandot's second riddle: 'flickers red and warm like a flame, but is not fire'?

Blood: Calaf answers 'il sangue', which flickers red and warm like a flame yet is not fire, and grows cold when you die.

What is the 'featherless bird' that lands on a wall until the wind blows it off in the Central European riddle?

The 'wind' is really the sun's warmth in some versions, melting the flake away.

In the widespread riddle 'White field, black seeds', what are the field and seeds?

A page and its letters: the white field is the page and the black seeds the letters; the Veronese Riddle (c. 800) adds oxen for the fingers and a plough for the pen.

What does a Rig Veda riddle mean by a 'twelve-spoked wheel, upon which stand 720 sons of one birth'?

The year: its twelve months are the spokes, and 360 days plus 360 nights make the 720 'sons of one birth' (Rig Veda 1.164.11).

What animal does the medieval riddle 'Four hang, two point the way, two ward off dogs, one dangles behind' describe?

A cow: four teats hang, two horns point the way, two hind legs ward off dogs and the tail dangles behind; a 13th-century Icelandic version appears in Hervarar saga.

In the German riddle where Two-legs sits on Three-legs holding One-leg, what is Three-legs?

A stool: Three-legs is the three-legged stool that Two-legs (a person) sits on; Four-legs is the dog and One-leg the ham hock they fight over.

In Rumpelstiltskin, what must the queen do within three days to keep her child?

Guess the imp's name: she has three days to name him, and succeeds only because her messenger overhears him singing 'Rumpelstiltskin' at his fire.

In the Monty Hall problem, what are your odds of winning the car if you switch doors?

2/3: switching wins whenever your first pick was wrong, which happens two times in three; Marilyn vos Savant's 1990 Parade column saying 'switch' drew thousands of angry letters.

In the missing dollar riddle ($30 paid, $3 back, bellhop keeps $2), where does the 'missing' dollar go?

Adding the tip to the $27 double-counts it; $25 in the till plus $2 tip is the $27 the guests paid.

In the classic wolf, cabbage and third-passenger river puzzle, which passenger crosses first?

The goat: it is the only passenger that cannot be left with either of the others, so it crosses first; the puzzle appears in Alcuin of York's Propositiones around 800.

What is the minimum number of moves needed to solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with three disks?

7: the minimum is 2 to the power n, minus 1, so three disks take 2^3 - 1 = 7 moves; 64 disks would take about 585 billion years at one move a second.

Who invented the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, first sold in 1883?

Édouard Lucas, a French mathematician, sold the puzzle in 1883 under the anagram 'N. Claus de Siam'; the booklet's tale of Brahmins moving 64 golden disks was a story sold with the puzzle.

Which logician named the Knights and Knaves puzzles, where knights tell the truth and knaves lie, in 1978?

Raymond Smullyan coined 'knights and knaves' in his 1978 puzzle book What Is the Name of This Book?, where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie.

On the island of knights and knaves, why can no inhabitant say 'I am a knave'?

Whether honest or dishonest, the speaker would contradict their own nature: a knight saying 'I am a knave' would be lying, and a knave saying it would be telling the truth.

In George Boolos's 1996 'Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever', the gods True, False and Random answer only in which words?

Da and ja: the gods answer every yes-no question in their own language, and you do not know which of 'da' and 'ja' means yes.

The Zebra Puzzle is often called whose 'riddle', despite no evidence he wrote it?

Albert Einstein: the puzzle is often called 'Einstein's Riddle', yet the 1962 Life International version names cigarette brands such as Kools that did not exist in his boyhood.

In the bridge and torch puzzle with crossing times 1, 2, 5 and 8 minutes, what is the fastest total in minutes?

15: 1 and 2 cross (2), 1 returns (1), 5 and 8 cross (8), 2 returns (2), 1 and 2 cross (2), so the two slowest never cross separately.

The nine dots puzzle asks you to join a 3×3 grid with how many straight lines without lifting the pen?

Four: the nine dots can be joined with four straight lines only by extending them beyond the square, a solution often linked to the phrase 'thinking outside the box'.

The 2015 viral logic puzzle 'Cheryl's Birthday' came from a maths olympiad in which country?

Singapore: the puzzle came from the 2015 Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad; its answer is July 16, and it went viral after a TV presenter posted it as a primary-school question.

Which paradox says an expected-value calculation suggests you should always swap, though the choices are symmetric?

One envelope holds twice as much as the other; the flawed argument says switching gains double while only risking half.

Which psychologist coined the term 'lateral thinking' in 1967?

Edward de Bono introduced 'lateral thinking' in his 1967 book The Use of Lateral Thinking, contrasting it with step-by-step 'vertical thinking'.

A riddle whose answer is a joke punchline, like 'Why did the chicken cross the road?', is called what?

A conundrum does not expect you to know the answer; it is a set-up for the gag.

A puzzle spelling words with pictures and letters, like a bee plus 'n' for 'been', is called what?

A rebus made only of letters, like 'CU' for 'see you', is a gramogram.

In The Hobbit, what does Gollum stake against Bilbo in their riddle game?

Showing him the way out of the tunnels: Gollum promises to guide Bilbo out if Bilbo wins the riddle game, and to eat him if Bilbo loses.

According to Tolkien scholarship, where do Gollum's riddles come from, in contrast to Bilbo's?

Old historical sources: scholars note that Gollum's riddles come from ancient riddle traditions while Bilbo's come from modern nursery books, showing the two share one old game.

The Riddler's real name in the Batman comics is a pun on which word?

Enigma: the Riddler's name Edward Nigma (E. Nigma) puns on 'enigma'; he taunts Batman with 'Riddle me this'.

Who played the Riddler in the 1995 film Batman Forever?

Jim Carrey played the Riddler in Batman Forever (1995); Frank Gorshin and John Astin had the role in the 1960s TV series, and Paul Dano in 2022's The Batman.

The tenth-century Exeter Book preserves roughly how many Old English verse riddles?

About 94: the Exeter Book's riddle count runs from 94 to 96 depending on how editors divide them, and several, including Riddle 95, have no agreed solution.

Some of the earliest recorded riddles, on a tablet from around 2000 BCE, come from which civilisation?

Sumer: a Sumerian tablet from around 2000 BCE preserves some of the earliest recorded riddles, long before the Greek Sphinx or Samson's riddle.

'Riddle', meaning a puzzling question, descends from which Old English word?

Rǣdels: Old English rǣdels (also rǣdelse) meant counsel, opinion or riddle, and shares a root with Dutch raadsel and German Rätsel; hriddel gave the sieve sense.

A puzzle like the St Ives rhyme, with houses, cats and mice, appears in which document from around 1650 BC?

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus: its Problem 79 sums 7 houses, 49 cats, 343 mice, 2,401 ears of spelt and 16,807 hekats, powers of seven just like the rhyme.

What was Arthur Wynne's first modern crossword, published in the New York World in 1913, originally called?

A word-cross: Wynne's 21 December 1913 puzzle was headed 'Word-Cross'; a few weeks later the name appeared as 'Cross-Word' by mistake and stuck.

Under what name did the modern Sudoku first appear in Dell puzzle books in 1979?

Number Place: Howard Garns's puzzle ran under that name in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games from 1979; Nikoli took it to Japan in 1984 and shortened its name to Sudoku in 1986.

The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, who was a professor of what?

Architecture: Rubik taught architecture and design at Budapest's College of Applied Arts when he built the cube in 1974; a standard cube has about 43 quintillion arrangements.

The Sator Square, a five-word Latin palindrome, was found earliest at which site?

The oldest versions put ROTAS, not SATOR, on the top line.

Hat problems, where prisoners deduce their own hat colour from others' behaviour, belong to which class of brain teaser?

Induction puzzles: each prisoner reasons from what the others could or could not have deduced, a form of mathematical induction; hat puzzles of this kind date to at least 1961.

In the Mahabharata, which hero must answer the riddles of a nature-spirit in the Yaksha Prashna?

Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, answers the Yaksha's questions at the lake and so revives his four brothers, who had died drinking before answering.

Which biblical visitor tested Solomon's wisdom with hard questions in 1 Kings 10?

The Queen of Sheba came 'to prove him with hard questions' (1 Kings 10:1) and left impressed by Solomon's answers; Samson's riddle in Judges 14 is the Bible's other famous one.

Which Latin poet's collection of 100 hexameter riddles shaped medieval riddle writing?

Symphosius, writing in late antiquity, left 100 three-line hexameter riddles; Aldhelm's Latin riddles and the anonymous Bern Riddles were modelled on his collection.

Which Norse god propounds around 37 riddles in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks?

Odin, disguised as Gestumblindi, poses the riddles to King Heiðrekr and wins by asking what he whispered in Baldr's ear; almost all surviving Old Norse riddles come from that section.

Which Finnish scholar published key work cataloguing and typologising riddles in 1918-20?

Antti Aarne's three-volume Vergleichende Rätselforschungen (1918-20) compared riddle types across cultures; Archer Taylor, who called riddling 'a universal art', later built on it for English riddles.

The Chinese riddle 'thousand li meet thousand gold' resolves into which character?

'Thousand li' becomes horse (千里馬) and 'thousand gold' (千金) means daughter; the characters for woman and horse together form 媽, mother.