Puzzle

How to spell puzzle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce puzzle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does puzzle mean?

1. nounA game, problem, or toy designed to test ingenuity or knowledge.
2. verbTo confuse or perplex someone, or to think hard about something difficult.

Puzzle in a sentence

• noun

  The children spent the rainy afternoon assembling a thousand-piece puzzle.

• verb

  The strange charge on the bank statement continued to puzzle her for weeks.

• noun

  The newspaper prints a fresh crossword puzzle every morning.

• verb

  The new tax rules puzzle even the most experienced accountants.

Where does puzzle come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Puzzle first appears in English in the late 1500s, and its exact origin is genuinely uncertain, which is why etymologists treat it with caution. The most widely accepted suggestion is that it grew out of the now-obsolete verb 'pose', meaning 'to perplex or baffle with a hard question', which itself came from 'appose' and 'oppose', both ultimately from the Latin ponere meaning 'to place or put'. On this account the frequentative ending -le was tacked on to give a sense of repeatedly perplexing someone, and the spelling settled with a doubled z. The earliest recorded meaning was the verb 'to confuse or bewilder', and only later, in the 1800s, did the noun come to mean a deliberately tricky toy or problem designed to test ingenuity, such as the jigsaw. Because no single clear ancestor survives in the written record, the doubled-z spelling is best learned by sight rather than reasoned from the root.

How the word is built

• puzzle (single root word of uncertain origin; the doubled -zz- and the final -le verb/noun ending are the spelling features to fix in memory)