What's the difference between puzzle and riddle?

Puzzle


Definition:

  • (v.) Something which perplexes or embarrasses; especially, a toy or a problem contrived for testing ingenuity; also, something exhibiting marvelous skill in making.
  • (v.) The state of being puzzled; perplexity; as, to be in a puzzle.
  • (v. t.) To perplex; to confuse; to embarrass; to put to a stand; to nonplus.
  • (v. t.) To make intricate; to entangle.
  • (v. t.) To solve by ingenuity, as a puzzle; -- followed by out; as, to puzzle out a mystery.
  • (v. i.) To be bewildered, or perplexed.
  • (v. i.) To work, as at a puzzle; as, to puzzle over a problem.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) More evil than Clocky , the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm , which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself.
  • (2) Our data and the model developed to interpret them in terms of fluctuations provide an explanation of the puzzling sharp reduction of water order near the chain-ordering phase transition.
  • (3) And David Ngog was a pointless signing too – one which puzzled us all.
  • (4) That's so far from how my mind works that I find it puzzling.
  • (5) This latest one continued developer Revolution Software’s run, sending you on the hunt for a stolen painting with puzzles and a well-worked storyline to hold your attention.
  • (6) Unexplained physical distress, when associated with alexithymia, becomes a diagnostic puzzle leading to prolonged investigation, ineffective treatment, and psychiatric referral.
  • (7) This scheme is used to rationalize previously puzzling data about the enzyme mechanism.
  • (8) With wearable computing just around the corner cracking integration with you, and indeed the organic-body, is critical for Apple and a final piece in the puzzle.
  • (9) Leanne Bowden, a mother of three on her way home on the school run, looks puzzled by the inquiry.
  • (10) The treatment of obesity remains a puzzling challenge because long-term maintenance of weight loss--one of the most suitable goals--is rarely achieved with conventional methods.
  • (11) It includes a reference to Banks's puzzling repeated insistence in media interviews that he "did not come up the river in a cabbage boat".
  • (12) In his letter responding to the resignation, the prime minister calls himself “puzzled and disappointed”.
  • (13) A persistent puzzle in our understanding of hemostasis has been the absence of hemorrhagic symptoms in the majority of patients with Hageman trait, the hereditary deficiency of Hageman factor (factor XII).
  • (14) "What was popular then was the puzzle: such qualities as psychological truth or even atmospheric location were secondary to it.
  • (15) A more pronounced decrease was produced by subjects working on puzzles than those working on mental calculation and by subjects working on easy tasks than those working on difficult tasks when the easy preceded the difficult ones.
  • (16) "We find it puzzling that the Department of Health would want a group that is opposed to abortion and provides no sexual health services on its sexual health forum."
  • (17) This MA lag of at least 2 years is consistent with the MA lag previously found on strategic games and puzzles.
  • (18) The boys attempted to solve two different sets of 10 find-a-word puzzles, one set following exposure to solvable puzzles, and one set following exposure to insolvable puzzles.
  • (19) That’s where blaming government failure fits into his ideological jigsaw puzzle.
  • (20) Some hypotheses about the cause of schizophrenia are based on the puzzling tendency for mental illness to affect the same sex when two close relatives become psychiatrically ill. Sex-concordance rates were examined in 71 schizophrenic probands, who had at least one first-degree relative suffering from the same disorder, in order to test this tendency in a population of recently admitted patients.

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?

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