riddle

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A proposition so framed as to exercise one's ingenuity in discovering its meaning; an ambiguous, complex, or puzzling question offered for solution; an enigma; a dark saying.
• noun Anything abstruse, intricate, paradoxical, or puzzling; a puzzle.
• noun A person who manifests ambiguities or contradictions of character or conduct.
• To explain; interpret; solve; unriddle.
• To understand; make out.
• To puzzle; perplex.
• To speak in riddles, ambiguously, or enigmatically.
• noun A sieve, especially a coarse one for sand, grain, and the like.
• noun In founding, a sieve with half-inch mesh, used in the molding-shop for cleaning and mixing old floor-sand.
• noun In hydraulic engineering, a form of river-weir.
• noun In wire-working, a flat board set with iron pins sloped in opposite directions. It is used to straighten wire, which is drawn in a zigzag course between the pins.
• To sift through a riddle or sieve: as, to riddle sand.
• To sift by means of a coarse-netted dredge, as young oysters on a bed.
• To reduce in quantity as if by sifting; condense.
• To fill with holes; especially, to perforate with shot so as to make like a riddle; hence, to puncture or pierce all over as if with shot; penetrate.
• To use a riddle or sieve; pass anything through a riddle.
• To fall in drops or fine streams, as through a riddle or sieve.
• noun A curtain; a bed-curtain; in a church, one of the pair of curtains inclosing an altar on the north and south, often hung from rods driven into the wall.
• To plait.
• noun In minting. See the extract.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun 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.
• noun A board having a row of pins, set zigzag, between which wire is drawn to straighten it.
• noun Something proposed to be solved by guessing or conjecture; a puzzling question; an ambiguous proposition; an enigma; hence, anything ambiguous or puzzling.
• transitive verb To separate, as grain from the chaff, with a riddle; to pass through a riddle.
• transitive verb To perforate so as to make like a riddle; to make many holes in.
• transitive verb To explain; to solve; to unriddle.
• intransitive verb To speak ambiguously or enigmatically.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A sieve.
• verb To fill with holes.
• verb To fill or spread throughout; to pervade.
• verb To put something through a sieve
• noun A verbal puzzle, mystery, or other problem of an intellectual nature, such as "It's black, and white, and red all over. What is it?"
• verb To speak ambiguously or enigmatically.
• verb transitive To solve, answer, or explicate a riddle or question

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb speak in riddles
• verb set a difficult problem or riddle
• verb pierce with many holes
• noun a difficult problem
• verb spread or diffuse through
• verb explain a riddle
• verb separate with a riddle, as grain from chaff
• noun a coarse sieve (as for gravel)