Riddle
A quotable statement built to conceal its referent until the hearer solves it.
A riddle is a deliberately obscure description whose answer is a single thing. It is a quotation form in the strict sense: riddles circulate verbatim, are attributed to collections rather than authors, and survive precisely because their wording cannot be paraphrased without destroying them.
Formally riddles work through metaphor and prosopopoeia — the object speaks in the first person, or is described in terms borrowed from an unrelated domain. The Exeter Book riddles, the riddles of the Sphinx and of Samson, and Sanskrit prahelikā all share this device.
Riddles matter to quotation study because they show the limit case of context-dependence. A riddle quoted without its answer is incomplete; quoted with its answer, it is no longer a riddle. Anthologies solve this by printing the solution in small type below or in an appendix.
Common mistake: calling any cryptic sentence a riddle. A riddle has a determinate answer that the form is designed to make guessable; a merely obscure line is not a riddle but an enigma in the loose sense.
“What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?”
Keep reading the glossary
A short Zen story or paradoxical question used as an object of meditation — a quote designed to resist easy quoting.
A figure of speech that describes one thing as if it were another.
A figure in which the speaker gives voice to an absent, dead, or non-human entity, letting it speak in the first person.
Verse composed largely of aphoristic sayings, usually didactic in intent.