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Riddle   /rˈɪdəl/   Listen
noun
Riddle  n.  
1.
A sieve with coarse meshes, usually of wire, for separating coarser materials from finer, as chaff from grain, cinders from ashes, or gravel from sand.
2.
A board having a row of pins, set zigzag, between which wire is drawn to straighten it.


Riddle  n.  Something proposed to be solved by guessing or conjecture; a puzzling question; an ambiguous proposition; an enigma; hence, anything ambiguous or puzzling. "To wring from me, and tell to them, my secret, That solved the riddle which I had proposed." "'T was a strange riddle of a lady."


verb
Riddle  v. t.  (past & past part. riddled; pres. part. riddling)  
1.
To separate, as grain from the chaff, with a riddle; to pass through a riddle; as, riddle wheat; to riddle coal or gravel.
2.
To perforate so as to make like a riddle; to make many holes in; as, a house riddled with shot.


Riddle  v. t.  To explain; to solve; to unriddle. "Riddle me this, and guess him if you can."


Riddle  v. i.  To speak ambiguously or enigmatically. "Lysander riddles very prettily."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Riddle" Quotes from Famous Books



... in my sleep last night between sleeping and waking. A figure standing beside me, thin, miserable, sad and sorrowful; the shadow of night upon his face, the tracks of the tears down his cheeks. His ribs were bending like the bottom of a riddle; his nose thin that it would go through a cambric needle; his shoulders hard and sharp that they would cut tobacco; his head dark and bushy like the top of a hill; and there is nothing I can liken his fingers to. His poor bones without any kind of covering; a withered ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... Quantity of labor cannot, therefore, be measured, in individual cases, by time units. Despite a hundred passages which, detached from their context, seem to imply the contrary, Adam Smith recognized this very clearly, and attempted to solve the riddle by a differentiation of skilled and unskilled labor in which he likens skilled labor to a machine; and insists that the labor and time spent in acquiring the skill which distinguishes skilled ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... for both, but they intended to solve them that day, to see which way the riddle ran, and the Wilderness itself was as dark, as calm and as somber as ever. It had been torn by cannon balls, pierced by rifle bullets and scorched by fire; but the two armies were yet buried in it and it gave no sign to the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... and wax-moths and ants, and even mice. These things eat the honey and riddle and ruin the comb. Then birds eat the bees, and spiders catch them. Honey-bees do nothing but good that I can see, yet Nature 's pleased to fill the world with their enemies. Queen and drone and the poor unsexed workers—all have their ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... to have visited Solomon, "to prove him with hard questions," by which have generally been understood enigmatical puzzles. Some of these are to be found in sacred writ, of which the riddle which Samson proposed to the young men of Timnath, is a very ancient and curious specimen. It appears from the writings of the ancients, that the Greeks and all the Eastern nations, were singularly attached to enigmas. Plutarch, in his Feast of the Seven Sages, introduces the following ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox


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