A Special Racecar

What is special about the phrase “Race car”?

It’s a palindrome (a word or phrase that’s spelled the same backwards and forwards).

Posted in Brain Teasers

Seven Letters and Something You Eat

I have seven letters and am something you eat. My only anagram can help your pain. If you remove my first 2 letters I wear things down. Removing my first 3 letters is an adjective and removing my first 4 letters leaves a measure of time.

What am I?

Sausage. You eat sausage, assuage is the only single-word anagram and provides relief from pain. Usage wears things down, sage is an adjective and age is a measure of time.

Posted in Riddles

Special Two Letter Combinations

What do these three letter combinations have in common?

DE
HI
MN

Hint: These combinations don’t have it in common.

AK
IN
WY

They are the only three US state abbreviations whose two letters are next to each other in the alphabet.

DE – Delaware
HI – Hawaii
MN – Minnesota

Posted in Brain Teasers

Fix This Roman Numeral Equation

This Roman numeral equation is wrong, but you can fix it without changing any of the elements of the equation. How is this possible?

I + XI = X

Look at it upside down. Instead of changing the equation, you can change your perspective.

This is from Dan Brown’s novel, Origin.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Useless Keys

What keys don’t unlock any doors?

Piano keys, keyboard keys, monkey, donkey, turkey, jockey, hockey, doohickey, malarkey and passkey. There may be others, but you get the drift.

Posted in Brain Teasers

You’ll See Me When the Sun is High and Also Late at Night

You’ll see me when the sun is high and also late at night,
I’m in the songs of holidays, when the snow is white,

Kings and Queens and royalty, are all found in me,
I’m the largest of them all, with just one you see,

Step by step with pounding feet, I’m tribes of angry men,
I’m above your hands right now, for help or to go again,

You’ll use me in the kitchen, or add a little more,
I’ll be in the years to come, and the days of yore.

What am I?

Twelve (12).

Noon and midnight are both 12 o’clock and the Twelve Days of Christmas is a popular Christmas carol.

There are twelve face cards in a standard 52-card deck and twelve is the largest number with one syllable.

There are twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, a troy pound is 12 ounces, there were 12 tribes of Israel and a popular movie was called, “Twelve Angry Men” (12 members of the jury). There are twelve function keys on your keyboard. F1 often shows a help screen and F5 reloads pages in your browser.

Many recipes measure items by the dozen, adding one more for a baker’s dozen. There are twelve months in a year.

It’s surprising how many times the number twelve shows up in our culture.

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A Perfect Counterfeit

A man can make perfect counterfeit bills. They look exactly like real ones, they’re made of exactly the same materials, made the same way, everything. So perfect, one could pretty much call them real bills. One day he successfully makes a perfect copy of another bill. However, he gets caught when he tries to use the copy. How is this possible?

As a counterfeiter, he had lots of counterfeit bills around and he accidentally used one of them as his original. So he made a perfect copy of a counterfeit bill.

Posted in Brain Teasers

Two Eights and Two Threes to Make Twenty Four

Using one or more addition, subtraction, multiplication or division operations, what formula using the numbers 3, 3, 8 and 8 equals 24?

8 ÷ (3 – (8 ÷ 3)) = 24

Posted in Brain Teasers

In A Dark Room with a Rope and a Pencil

Imagine you are in a dark room with a locked door. All you have with you is a rope and a pencil. You can hear the rain outside, but there
are no windows. How do you get out?

Stop imagining.

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Three Brothers Share A Family Sport

Three brothers share a family sport:
A non-stop marathon
The oldest one is fat and short
And trudges slowly on
The middle brother’s tall and slim
And keeps a steady pace
The youngest runs just like the wind,
A-speeding through the race
“He’s young in years, we let him run,”
The other brothers say
“‘Cause though he’s surely number one,
He’s second, in a way.”

The hands on a clock (hour, minute, second).

Posted in Riddles