A collection of riddles, puzzles and brain teasers. Can you think your way through every solution? Click the "View Answer" link in order to reveal the solution (note: this requires javascript to be enabled in your browser).
Riddle 1
You eat something you neither plant nor plow.
It is the son of water, but if water touches it, it dies.
Salt, Ice
Riddle 2
A serpent swam in a silver urn
A golden bird did in its mouth abide
The serpent drank the water, this in turn
Killed the serpent. Then the gold bird died.
An oil lamp
Riddle 3
My tines are long
My tines are short
My tines end ere
My first report
Lightning, or lightning bolt.
Riddle 4
Turn us on our backs
And open up our stomachs
You will be the wisest of men
Though at start a lummox
A book
Riddle 5
The hungry dog howls
For crust of bread
His cry goes unheard
It's far overhead
Moon (the dog is howling at the moon).
Riddle 6
Bury deep,
Pile on stones,
My mind will always
Dig up them bones
Memories
Riddle 7
A cloth poorly dyed
And an early morning sky
How are they the same?
Their color changes easily
Riddle 8
It occurs once in every minute
Twice in every moment
And yet never in one hundred thousand years.
Letter 'M'
Riddle 9
Never ahead, ever behind,
Yet flying swiftly past;
For a child I last forever,
For adults I'm gone too fast.
Childhood
Riddle 10
Two horses, swiftest travelling,
Harnessed in a pair, and
Gazing ever in places
Distant from them.
Your eyes - Or the sun & the moon
Riddle 11
It can be said:
To be gold is to be good;
To be stone is to be nothing;
To be glass is to be fragile;
To be cold is to be cruel.
Unmetaphored, what am I?
A heart
Riddle 12
Round she is, yet flat as a board
Altar of the Lupine Lords.
Jewel on black velvet, pearl in the sea
Unchanged but e'er changing, eternally.
Moon
Riddle 13
Twice four and twenty blackbirds
sitting in the rain
I shot and killed a quarter of them
How many do remain?
This riddle can be viewed from several different ways, and COULD have different answers, depending on how the question is viewed...
Answer 1: 2x(4+20)=48, if 1/4 of 48 are shot (12) ... these 12 will remain (dead) and the rest will fly away.
Answer 2: 2x(4+20)=48, if 1/4 of 48 are shot (12) ... there will be 36 birds left (48-12=36).
Answer 3: Upon shooting any of the birds, the rest will all fly away. So the answer could be "none."
Other: It can be argued that "twice four" is 8 and then adding 20 equals 28. It really depends on how the question is read.
Riddle 14
All in white,
with a fossil, fresh snow, a loan, and the sky ...
But just what am I?
A bride (something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue).
Riddle 15
It has a golden head
It has a golden tail
but it has no body.
Gold coin
Riddle 16
A leathery snake,
With a stinging bite,
I'll stay coiled up,
Unless I must fight.
A whip
Riddle 17
There is not wind enough to twirl
That one red leaf, nearest of its clan,
Which dances as often as dance it can.
Fire
Riddle 18
At night they come without being fetched,
And by day they are lost without being stolen
Stars
Riddle 19
I am, in truth, a yellow fork
From tables in the sky
By inadventant fingers dropped
The awful cutlery.
Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed,
The apparatus of the dark
To ignorance revealed.
Lightning, (Emily Dickinson)
Riddle 20
Many-maned scud-thumper,
Maker of worn wood,
Shrub-ruster,
Sky-mocker,
Rave!
Portly pusher,
Wind-slave.
Ocean
