Riddle

How to spell riddle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce riddle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does riddle mean?

1. nounA question or statement deliberately phrased to be puzzling, posed as a game to be solved.
2. verbTo pierce something with many holes, or to fill it thoroughly with something (often flaws or defects).

Riddle in a sentence

• noun

  The children passed the long car journey by trading every riddle they knew.

• verb

  Woodworm can riddle an antique table with tiny holes within a single season.

• noun

  The ancient inscription read like a riddle that no scholar could crack.

• verb

  Errors riddle the first draft of the report from top to bottom.

Where does riddle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

There are actually two old words tangled together in modern 'riddle'. The puzzle sense comes from the Old English raedels(e), which meant an opinion, a conjecture, or a thing to be guessed, and it was built on the verb raedan, meaning 'to advise, to interpret, or to read'. So a riddle was literally something you had to interpret, the same root that gives us the modern word 'read'. The final 's' of raedels was wrongly heard as a plural and dropped in the Middle Ages, leaving the singular 'riddle'. Quite separately, the 'riddle' that means a coarse sieve descends from Old English hridder or hriddel, a word for a sifting frame; from that physical image of something punched full of holes came the verb sense 'to riddle with holes', as in a wall riddled with bullets. Both branches are genuinely Germanic and native to English, which is why the spelling stayed short and plain.

How the word is built

• riddle (from Old English raedels: opinion, conjecture, puzzle, related to raedan 'to advise, interpret')