343 riddles
Riddles
Old riddles and brain teasers. The answer stays hidden until you ask for it.
Two kinds of shine
One for the classroom, one for the cupboard
Full of holes
Riddled with holes, and it still holds water.
Always coming
It’s always on its way and it never gets here.
The end of a rainbow
No pot of gold, no leprechaun. Something much more reliable.
Tastes better than it smells
Plenty of food smells better than it tastes. This goes the other way.
Not a hair wet
No hat, no hood, no umbrella, heavy rain, and not one hair on his head gets wet.
Twenty weddings
A man in a village marries twenty women and nobody calls the police.
The blind beggar
A blind beggar, a brother who died, and a relationship that isn’t the obvious one.
Not twins
Two brothers, born in the same hour of the same day of the same year, and they aren’t twins.
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet dead on the floor again, and this time there’s no poison.
The glass of water
He asks for water, gets a gun pointed at him, and leaves saying thank you.
Thirteen letters
A three-letter animal, spelt with thirteen letters, and every one of them is right.
The yellow hat
A yellow hat, the Red Sea and a question that sounds harder than it is.
A horn that doesn’t honk
It has a horn and it will never once beep at you.
A room with no walls
No walls, no doors, no windows, and you can still call it a room.
Out of the window
She throws something out of the window, and it kills her.
A free dinner
He pays the bill, and the meal still costs him nothing.
Dying of thirst at home
A man dies of thirst without ever leaving home.
Light as a feather
It weighs nothing, and even the strongest person can’t hang on to it for long.
Shot in the driver’s seat
Locked doors, closed windows, no bullet holes, and a dead man at the wheel.
Socks in the dark
Getting dressed in the dark, with a drawer full of two colours.
Stuck in a corner
It sees the world without ever leaving its corner.
A pack on his back
A body in the Arctic, and a pack on his back.
As many again
A man meets a crowd in the street and counts them by wishing there were more.
Two swift horses
A riddle put to the hero Zal in the Shahnameh, Persia’s book of kings, a thousand years ago.
The hound and the hare
A chase from a puzzle book credited to Charlemagne’s schoolmaster.
The last furrow
A trick question set for schoolboys some twelve hundred years ago.
Up the chimney
A nursery conundrum that sounds like a tongue-twister and isn’t one.
Nine coins
Nine coins, one of them heavy, and a balance that can only compare.
Backwards and forwards
Three letters, and it reads the same both ways round.
Tomorrow and yesterday
From an American book of riddles printed in 1846, and it still works.
The cashier’s notes
Sam Loyd’s bank puzzle from 1914, moved from dollars to pounds.
Hitty Pitty
A nursery riddle from a 17th-century manuscript, about something that bites if you touch it.
The moment he knew
A man in a lift knows his wife has just died. Nobody told him.
Two mates, no captain
A wordplay riddle about a ship the navy has never heard of.
Spotted in heaven
Thousands of naked strangers, and he picks out two of them straight away.
Losing its head
A children’s riddle, and a fair one.
Sharper than a thorn
Another of the Devil’s questions, from a ballad first written down around 1450.
Never interrupted
A writer with millions of readers, one interruption and no second chance.
The three boxes
A French mathematician’s trap from 1889, and most people still walk straight into it.
The split head
A riddle from al-Hariri of Basra, written nearly a thousand years ago.
The snail’s lunch
A swallow invites a snail to lunch. It’s a fair way, and the snail is a snail.
Something in the corner
Another one from the Exeter Book. A thousand years on, it still makes people go red.
A hundred pigs for a hundred pence
A medieval shopping puzzle with exactly one right answer.
The seventeen horses
Seventeen horses, three sons and a neighbour who rides home on the horse he lent.
The white field
A riddle jotted down in Verona around the year 800, in a language halfway between Latin and Italian.
The two hourglasses
An egg, two hourglasses and a nine-minute boil.
The house you enter blind
One of the oldest riddles ever written down, from Sumerian clay tablets.
The feather
A dead man and a feather, and nothing else to go on.
The two guards
One door to freedom, one to death, one liar, one honest man and one question to ask.
The five pirates
Five greedy pirates, a hundred gold coins and a vote that could end in a splash.
Two legs sat upon three legs
An old English nursery riddle that is mostly legs.
The spider and the fly
A spider, a fly and a long thin room, in Henry Dudeney’s best-known puzzle.
The snake with a pearl head
A one-line riddle from ninth-century Baghdad, by one of its great poets.
The circle of forty-one
Forty-one men, a deadly count and one safe place to stand.
The singing garments
A thousand-year-old riddle from the Exeter Book, and one of its prettiest.
The twelve coins
Twelve coins, one fake and a balance scale, in a puzzle that ate a lot of wartime afternoons.