If you’re anything like us, you love words with peculiar properties and quizzical quirks. We mean the kind of words that make for great brain teasers that you can pull out at parties, at the dinner table, or wherever else you want to impress and perplex the other word lovers in your life.
We’ve compiled 20 of our favorite word riddles and trivia questions to test your lexical knowledge.
Click “Reveal answer” under each question to show the solution.
Word Riddles
These word-based questions are all about double or hidden meanings.
1. What kind of coat is always wet when you put it on?
Reveal answer
a coat of paint
2. What gets wetter as it dries?
Reveal answer
a towel
3. What can you break by doing nothing at all?
Reveal answer
a promise
4. What disappears the moment you say its name?
Reveal answer
silence
5. What can be cracked, made, told, and played?
Reveal answer
a joke
6.What gets bigger the more you remove from it?
Reveal answer
a hole
7. What belongs to you but is used more by other people?
Reveal answer
your name
Word Trivia
These questions are all about words with special qualities that make them unique from others.
8. What word retains the same pronunciation even after you take away four of its five letters?
Reveal answer
queue (When you take away four of its letters, you’re left with the letter q.)
9. Which two English words are spelled with all of the vowels (including y) appearing only once and in alphabetical order?
Reveal answer
10. What is the longest word in English with only one vowel (not including y)?
Reveal answer
strengths
11. What is the longest word in English that doesn’t use the vowels a, e, i, o, or u?
Reveal answer
rhythms
12. What word meaning “having five syllables” is an example of an autological word—meaning a word that describes itself?
Reveal answer
pentasyllabic (Other examples of autological words are adjectival, unhyphenated, pronounceable, and seventeen-lettered).
13. What eight-letter word and nine-letter word both begin and end with h-e?
Reveal answer
headache and heartache
14. What solitary five-letter word keeps the same meaning when you remove its first letter, and then again when you remove the first letter of the remaining word?
Reveal answer
alone (Remove the a to get lone, then remove the l to get one!)
15. What, when thrown out of a window, leaves a grieving wife, but when dropped in the middle of a door might just save a life?
Reveal answer
the letter n (Remove it from window, and you get widow. Add it to door and get donor.)
16. What heavy seven-letter word can you remove one letter from to get the number 80, but remove two letters from to get the number 8?
Reveal answer
weighty
17. What seven-letter word would you spell if you started with a two-letter word for a male person, added another letter to form a word for a female person, added another letter to form a word for a great person, and added three more letters to form a word for a great woman?
Reveal answer
heroine (The first two letters are he, the first three letters are her, and the first four letters are hero.)
18. What four-letter word in its uppercase form can be written forward, backward, or upside down and can still be read as the same word from left to right?
Reveal answer
NOON
19. What common three-letter English verb can become its own past tense form simply by rearranging its letters?
Reveal answer
eat (Its past tense is ate.)
20. What do the words in the following sentence have in common? Bad mood naps stop evil.
Reveal answer
They all spell another word when reversed.
