About Riddle Up
Riddle Up is a free library of riddles, brain teasers and puzzles - 5,257 of them, sorted into 33 categories, every one with its answer.
We built it because looking up a riddle online is usually worse than it should be. You get a listicle with the answers hidden three scrolls down, or a page that makes you click through a slideshow to find out that the thing with legs that does not walk is a table. We wanted the opposite: the riddle, the answer, and a sentence explaining why that is the answer, all on one page, on a site that loads quickly and does not shout at you.
What you will find here
- 5,257 riddles with answers, organised by age (kids, teens, adults), by difficulty (easy, medium, hard, expert), by format ("What am I?", lateral thinking, rebus, maths) and by theme (animals, food, holidays, horror, sport and more).
- An answer and an explanation on every riddle, plus multiple-choice options where the riddle suits them.
- Games - Riddle Quiz, 10-Second Riddle, Riddle Streak, Riddle Survival, Word Scramble, Emoji Riddle and the Number Sequence Challenge - with real leaderboards and no account required.
- A riddle of the day on the homepage, chosen fresh every morning.
Where our riddles come from
Riddles are folk literature. Most of the classics - the ones about candles, rivers, shadows and echoes - have been passed around for generations and have no known author, which is exactly why versions of them appear on every riddle site there is. We collect that traditional material, clean up the wording, and then add the part that is genuinely ours: the answer explanation, the hints, the difficulty rating and the category structure.
We do not publish riddles that are demonstrably somebody's original, copyrighted work without permission. If you believe we have, tell us and we will take it down - see our Terms of Use.
How we check answers
Every riddle in the collection goes through the same pass before it goes live:
- Duplicate check. The riddle text is normalised (lower-cased, punctuation and spacing stripped) and hashed against the whole collection. If it already exists, the new copy is merged into the existing one rather than becoming a second page for the same riddle.
- Answer check. Maths, logic and science riddles are worked through by hand. Wordplay riddles are checked against the traditional intended answer.
- Ambiguity note. Where a riddle has a well-known second answer, we say so in the explanation instead of pretending it does not exist.
- Difficulty rating. Assigned editorially from riddle length, vocabulary, the number of logical steps and how much lateral thinking is required.
- Audience labelling. Categories aimed at children are reviewed for language and theme. Categories that are not for children are labelled plainly, so a parent or teacher can tell at a glance.
Across a collection this size, errors get through. When a reader reports one we check it and fix it, usually the same week. Corrections from readers are the single biggest reason the collection has got better.
Who Riddle Up is for
Parents and teachers use the kids' categories for lunchbox notes, car journeys, classroom warm-ups and rainy-day cover lessons. Quiz hosts raid the hard and expert categories for tie-breakers. Puzzle solvers come for the lateral thinking and detective riddles. And a fair number of people simply want to know the answer to the one riddle a colleague will not stop repeating - which is what the individual riddle pages are for.
How Riddle Up is paid for
Riddle Up is free and always will be. There is no account, no paywall and no newsletter you have to join to see an answer. The site is supported by advertising. We keep ads out of the way of the riddle itself, and we do not hide answers behind them.
Privacy, in one paragraph
You can read every riddle on this site without telling us anything. There are no accounts. Our games identify you with a random id in a cookie so your leaderboard score survives between visits - that is the extent of it. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.
Get in touch
Found a wrong answer? Know a better explanation? Have a riddle you would like added? Email hello@riddleup.com or use the contact page. We read everything.
Riddle Up is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with any other riddle or puzzle publisher.