What's the difference between koan and riddle?

Koan


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Not for consideration : Anthony Bennett (Cleveland Cavaliers) Here's a koan for the basketball fans out there: if it's Cleveland making the selection, are they really that lucky?
  • (2) It’s the unanswerable question, like a zen koan of sports.
  • (3) July 17, 2013 Updated at 5.05pm BST 4.44pm BST Emanuel Cleaver, Democrat of Missouri, has a koan-like question for the Fed chair: What would be the consequences of easing quantitative easing prematurely?

Riddle


Definition:

  • (n.) 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.
  • (n.) A board having a row of pins, set zigzag, between which wire is drawn to straighten it.
  • (v. t.) To separate, as grain from the chaff, with a riddle; to pass through a riddle; as, riddle wheat; to riddle coal or gravel.
  • (v. t.) To perforate so as to make like a riddle; to make many holes in; as, a house riddled with shot.
  • (n.) Something proposed to be solved by guessing or conjecture; a puzzling question; an ambiguous proposition; an enigma; hence, anything ambiguous or puzzling.
  • (v. t.) To explain; to solve; to unriddle.
  • (v. i.) To speak ambiguously or enigmatically.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The neo-Nazi murder trial revealing Germany's darkest secrets – podcast Read more From the very start, the investigation was riddled with basic errors and faulty assumptions.
  • (2) An IOC member for 23 years he has assidiously collected the leadership of the acronym heavy subsets of that organisation, which may be less riddled with corruption than it was before the Salt Lake City scandal but has swapped outlandish bribes for mountains of bureaucracy.
  • (3) Defence lawyers contended that Saiful's testimony about the alleged sodomy, at a Kuala Lumpur condominium in 2008, was riddled with inconsistencies and the DNA evidence mishandled by investigators.
  • (4) He admitted, however, that he had not been able to find any record of this incident on the police computer and Mr Justice Riddle said that the evidence was "third-hand, anonymous hearsay".
  • (5) From time to time I'd bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was a character but that world was riddled with half-cut, doped-up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn't especially register.
  • (6) Mostly Nick was uncommunicative and occasionally he’d become talkative and you hung on his every word even though, very often, one didn’t know what they meant because he’d talk in riddles.
  • (7) I just think of when I dressed Tom and brushed his hair when his remains were returned to me, his body riddled with bullet holes.
  • (8) These counter-transferential concerns ultimately made the woman's psychological essence an unknowable riddle for Freud.
  • (9) But it was not smart to tell Jemima Khan that the new-look Tory party was "riddled with gays".
  • (10) What they say "You are an enigma wrapped in a riddle nestled in a sesame seed bun of mystery" – Stephen Colbert
  • (11) The response of the authorities is riddled with contradictions.
  • (12) Defence lawyers contended that Saiful's testimony about the alleged sodomy, at a Kuala Lumpur apartment in 2008, was riddled with inconsistencies and the DNA evidence mishandled by investigators.
  • (13) The dog shit – once warm, then frozen hard, and currently melting in the sun into pools of bacteria-riddled goop – and the used condoms and the defrosting vomit, the artifact of what some drunken bros ate on a wild February night preserved for the bottom of my shoe many weeks later.
  • (14) Police have carried out a series of operations against the Russian mafia and its money-laundering operations in Spain's corruption-riddled property sector over the past four years.
  • (15) She’s riddled with guilt now she sees that nothing has changed.
  • (16) The study reveals that while general awareness of AIDS is fairly good, detailed knowledge is riddled with misconceptions and confusion.
  • (17) Quite why Scotland Yard should behave like this remains unproved – another riddle waiting to be solved.
  • (18) Narendra Modi’s India, while growing quickly, remains riddled with uninvestigated corruption scandals .
  • (19) How apt that terms of bigotry should be riddled with class snobbery.
  • (20) The more serious riddle for the government is: how on earth did this policy get through in the first place?

Words possibly related to "riddle"