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THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION

100+ Best Riddles With Answers

Some riddles get told once and forgotten. Others outlive the language they were written in. This is our ranking of the 100 best riddles with answers, starting with the ones that have survived centuries and working through to modern favourites.

Under the trickiest entries we have added a short note on where the misdirection sits, because knowing why a riddle works is most of what makes it worth repeating.

Tap any riddle to reveal its answer.

FIND A RIDDLE

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RANKED COLLECTION

The 20 Best Riddles of All Time

Ranked by how long they have lasted and how often they still catch people out.
FAMOUS & FAMILIAR

Best Classic Riddles Everyone Should Know

The common riddles. You have probably heard most of these, and that is exactly why they are worth keeping in your pocket.

Younger solvers will get further with riddles for kids, sorted by grade level, and easy riddles carry several hundred more in this same register.

READ IT TWICE

Best Wordplay Riddles

The answer is sitting inside the wording. Read each one twice.

Funny riddles push this further toward the punchline, and what am I riddles run the self describing format all the way through.

OUR EDITORIAL TEST

How We Choose Best Riddles

Three tests, and every riddle above passes all three.

01

It has lasted.

The top twenty have been told for generations, some for millennia. A riddle that survives translation and centuries of retelling is doing something a clever one liner written last week is not.

02

It misdirects with one word.

The strongest riddles hinge on a single term carrying two meanings: take, single, spell, all but. Weaker ones pile on vague imagery and hope you guess.

03

The answer is ordinary.

Eggs, candles, shadows, footsteps. The gap between how elaborate the question sounds and how mundane the answer turns out to be is the entire pleasure of the form.

Anything that failed a test did not make the list. Plenty of those are still worth telling, and good riddles collects the ones that work best read out loud to other people.

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The riddle of the day changes every morning at midnight, and the archive holds every one we have published.

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HELPFUL ANSWERS

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick answers about the best riddles, famous classics, answers and daily puzzles.

The riddle of the Sphinx, at number one above, is the most famous and the most durable. It has been told for around two and a half thousand years and still catches people out. Among modern favourites, the footsteps riddle at number five gets shared more than anything else on this site.
The Sphinx riddle, Tolkien’s fish riddle and the time riddle from The Hobbit, the echo riddle, and the map riddle. All five appear in the top ten above. They recur across cultures and centuries, which is the clearest signal a riddle is genuinely well built.
Search any part of the riddle you remember in the box at the top of this page. Every riddle here has its own page carrying the answer and an explanation, so you can send the link to whoever asked you.
The classic section is. Sections further down assume more vocabulary and more patience. For anything you plan to read to a class, riddles for kids sorts everything by grade level.
One that states its own answer somewhere in the wording and relies on you skimming past it. “What is the capital of France?” is the standard example, where the answer is the letter F. There is a full section of them above.
The riddle of the day changes every morning at midnight, and the archive holds every one we have published.