Riddles and Brain Teasers

Sequoia, eulogia or miaoued are all good options, but there’s an even shorter (and more obscure) word with all the vowels and not a single consonant: Iouea. It’s not the kind of word you’d use at the dinner table, but it’s listed in the Wikipedia dictionary as a genus of Cretaceous fossil sponges.If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.

If you got really tricky and tried to find a word that contained the letters in the phrase ‘all of the vowels’, you probably found, like I did, that there isn’t one. But it was still worth checking.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Two In A Whole And Four In A Pair

Two in a whole and four in a pair
And six in a trio you see
And eight’s a quartet but what you must get
Is the name that fits just one of me?

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A half.

Posted in Riddles

Decorating With Tiles

You are decorating for spring and you’ve found a bargain. A huge box of beautifully decorated tiles, enough to provide a border in two rooms. You really can’t figure out how to arrange them. If you set a border of two tiles all around, there’s one left over. If you set three tiles all around or four or five or six there’s still one tile left over. Finally you try a block of seven tiles for each corner and you come out even. What is the smallest number of tiles you could have to get this result?

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301. This is the smallest number that even divides by 7, but when divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 gives you one left over.

Posted in Brain Teasers

A Blood Red Shroud

The thunder comes before the lightning,
And the lightning comes before the cloud,
The rain dries all the land it touches,
Wrapping the earth in a blood red shroud.

What am I?

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A volcano.

Posted in Riddles

What is the secret to this?

A1
C1
E3
H3

What comes next?

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I2.Each entry is a letter, in alphabetical order starting with A, followed by the number of occurrences of that letter in the phrase “What is the secret to this”.There’s one ‘a’, thus we get A1. There are no ‘b’s so it doesn’t appear, then there’s one ‘c’, and so on.

I2.

Each entry is a letter, in alphabetical order starting with A, followed by the number of occurrences of that letter in the phrase “What is the secret to this”.

There’s one ‘a’, thus we get A1. There are no ‘b’s so it doesn’t appear, then there’s one ‘c’, and so on.

Posted in Brain Teasers

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