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?

The pair endlessly produce each other, which is the whole trick.

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

The guests only got the answer by extorting it from Samson's wife, and he paid the lost bet with thirty stolen suits.

The nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty' probably began life as a riddle. What was the answer?

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?

That is the narrator, the man, 7 wives, 49 sacks, 343 cats and 2,401 kits.

The Mad Hatter asks Alice 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' What answer does the Hatter himself give?

Lewis Carroll later invented an answer for readers who kept asking, and puzzle-maker Sam Loyd offered the Poe one.

In Turandot, the princess asks what is born each night and dies each dawn. What does Calaf answer?

His second answer is 'blood', for the thing that flickers red and warm like a flame but is not fire.

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

A wrong answer to any of the three riddles means execution for the suitor.

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.

The worldwide 'writing riddle' runs 'White field, black seeds'. What are the field and seeds?

The eighth-century Veronese Riddle adds oxen for the scribe's 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'?

Twelve months, and 360 days plus 360 nights make the 720 'sons'.

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

Four teats, two horns, two back legs and a tail; a 13th-century Icelandic version survives.

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

Two-legs is a person, Four-legs a dog and One-leg the ham hock they are fighting over.

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

She only succeeds because a messenger overhears him singing his own name.

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

Marilyn vos Savant's 1990 Parade column saying 'switch' drew thousands of angry letters, many from people with PhDs.

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 oldest known version is in a 9th-century manuscript by Alcuin of York.

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

The general formula is 2 to the power n, minus 1; 64 disks would take 585 billion years at one move a second.

Who invented the Tower of Hanoi puzzle in 1883, hiding his name in the anagram 'N. Claus de Siam'?

The booklet's legend of Brahmins moving 64 golden disks was pure marketing.

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

The name comes from his book What Is the Name of This Book?

On Smullyan's island, why can no inhabitant ever say 'I am a knave'?

That single observation cracks most puzzles of the type.

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

You do not know which word means yes, which is what makes it hard.

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

Its 1962 Life International version mentions cigarette brands 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?

The trick is sending the two slowest across together so their times do not both count separately.

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

The solution requires drawing beyond the grid, the origin of the phrase 'thinking outside the box'.

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

The answer is July 16; a TV presenter mistook it for a primary-school exam question and it spread worldwide.

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?

He used the Judgement of Solomon and the nine dots puzzle as his early examples.

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?

If Bilbo loses, Gollum gets to eat him.

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

Bilbo's riddles are drawn from modern nursery books, which is why the two understand the game but not each other.

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

Edward Nigma introduces his crimes with 'Riddle me this'.

Who played the Riddler in the 1995 film Batman Forever?

Gorshin and Astin had the role in the 1960s TV series; Dano took it in 2022's The Batman.

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

Scholars still argue over the exact count, and some, like Riddle 95, remain unsolved.

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

The Sumerian genre term was i-bi-lu-dug-ga.

The English word 'riddle' descends from which Old English word?

It shares a root with Dutch raadsel and German Rätsel.

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

Problem 79 multiplies powers of seven, just as the rhyme does.

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

An illustrator later flipped the name around and it stuck.

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

Nikoli popularised it in Japan in 1986 under the name Sudoku, roughly 'single number'.

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

A standard cube has about 43 quintillion possible 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?

They date back to at least 1961 and rely on everyone trusting everyone else's logic.

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

The Sanskrit Rigveda, from around 1500-1000 BCE, holds what are thought to be the world's oldest surviving poetic riddles.

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

Riddles are rare in the Bible; Samson's in Judges 14 is the most famous, and Sirach calls them a dinner pastime.

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

The anonymous Bern Riddles of the early seventh century and Aldhelm's 101 Anglo-Saxon riddles were modelled on him.

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

Almost all surviving Old Norse riddles come from that one section of the saga.

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

Archer Taylor, who called riddling 'a universal art', later built on that foundation for English-language riddles.

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

'Thousand kilometre' becomes horse and 'thousand gold' becomes daughter; together they form the character for mother.