| 释义 |
noun ˈrɪd(ə)lˈrɪdl 1A question or statement intentionally phrased so as to require ingenuity in ascertaining its answer or meaning. they started asking riddles and telling jokes Example sentencesExamples - Rob's words echoed through my brain, and they sounded like some cryptic riddle.
- Her echo bounced from wall to wall, penetrating his ears like an unsolvable riddle.
- Bilbo's next riddle is answered but he has trouble with Gollum's.
- Here's a zen riddle: How lumpy must a sauce be before it can be called a vegetable?
- Hamlet asks the gravediggers who is to be buried, but he receives riddles instead of answers.
- If you fail to answer his riddles correctly, you will not be allowed safe passage through the forest.
- Many riddles were embedded in rhymes, playfully disguising answers in metaphors and analogies.
- Aspiring suitors have to answer three ridiculous riddles of the sort that do the rounds in Dublin pubs.
- Some of the pictures are fascinating in that the images seem to pose little visual riddles.
- Answer the riddle, and your life shall be spared.
- Fleur plays Princess Turandot, declaring that she will marry the man who correctly answers her three riddles, while those who fail will be killed.
- Calaf is mesmerized by the princess' beauty and resolves to answer her three riddles and win her hand.
- He regarded Haley with a critical eye, as if figuring out a riddle.
- Midnight had arrived, but Leander still hadn't figured out the riddle.
- During the latest bachelor party, a man in an ape suit served as master of ceremonies as guests were required to answer a series of riddles.
- A prize that I will get if, and only if, I solve the secret riddle.
- Old Zen riddle: if a policy is announced and no one hears it, is it really announced?
- Shorter answers every other question with a riddle and punctuates his conversation with statements such as ‘The only constant is change.’
- Many of Vermeer's paintings appear to pose riddles as to who sees whom and what, when.
- She was pleased at herself as if she had just figured out a riddle.
- 1.1 A person or thing that is difficult to understand or explain.
Example sentencesExamples - Through Christ and in Christ, the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful.
- But no one has answered the related riddle: Who wins if both sides bring their voters to the polls in record numbers?
- Yes, their coquettishness and evasions can exasperate men looking for an unequivocal answer to riddles of life and love.
- His experiments on the lift and drag of an aircraft helped answer the riddle of how birds fly and led to new wing designs.
- Each of us is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
- But only one asset will help us crack the US interest rate riddle: patience.
- A set of hypotheses has been suggested to explain this exceptional riddle of fish reproduction, but as yet they remain untested.
- Earlier this year, it had sat for weeks to unravel the riddle of the sinking.
- Advancing age has occasionally brought resolution, more often just a little understanding, to many of these riddles, but not necessarily to the resilient ambiguity of history.
- Perhaps, to answer the riddle posed by the Palace substitution script, we should take a similar path.
- The grieving friends of a York man who drowned in mysterious circumstances have launched a campaign to solve the riddle of his death.
- They were words she could not understand, but still she searched among them for some clue, some answer to the riddle of her life.
- Whatever the answer to the riddle of quantum reality, the correct assessment of the role and meaning of observers in the Universe must await the outcome of the confrontation of the Cosmos with the quantum.
- The first answer to the riddle of existence, therefore, is that substance exists, and exists necessarily.
- Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution.
- Not only has it helped to explain life's innermost riddles, but it has posed challenging questions about human behaviour and ethics, and offered controversial new technologies.
- Cold comfort for the grieving Parks, who is now trying to solve the riddle of his granddaughter's death.
- But Grinsell was writing before the invention of radiocarbon dating - surely here was the chance to answer the riddle of the round skull?
- Whatever helps understand this riddle is significant, I am pleased that I, in a small way, did something with it.
- Understanding exactly what capital is unlocks the riddle of the market system.
Synonyms puzzle, conundrum, brain-teaser, Chinese puzzle, problem, unsolved problem, question, poser, enigma, mystery, quandary, paradox Zen Buddhism koan informal stumper
verb ˈrɪd(ə)lˈrɪdl [no object]archaic 1Speak in or pose riddles. he who knows not how to riddle Example sentencesExamples - The clown Feste has incurred Olivia's displeasure by a long absence, but contrives to regain her favour by riddling that she is more foolish than he for mourning that her brother is in Heaven.
- Small touches in each of these short stories illustrate Edgeworth's use of codes and riddling.
- 1.1with two objects Solve or explain (a riddle) to (someone)
Phrases talk (or speak) in riddles Express oneself in an ambiguous or puzzling manner. you're talking in riddles—do you mean his mother? Example sentencesExamples - Pleat preferred to talk in riddles about the future of the club rather than the game, which Spurs won thanks to two fine individual goals.
- There were reports of a permanently stoned Perry walking backwards and talking in riddles while striking the ground with a hammer.
- Would you please just stop talking in riddles?
- Anyone walking through the Looking Glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn't so common.
- I point out that I'm here to find out stuff, not talk in riddles.
- The members start wearing fancy dress and talking in riddles and inventing elaborate codes of conduct.
- He speaks in riddles; no one understands a word he says.
- Sorry if it sounds like I'm talking in riddles here.
- He speaks in riddles, shrouds his decisions in mystery, never gives individual interviews and is so paranoid at being misquoted that he refuses to have his sphinx-like utterances translated into English.
- Out of respect to tradition, I always make a point of speaking in riddles or of burying my very best prophecies in a set of casual, seemingly off-hand remarks.
Derivatives noun ˈrɪd(ə)ləˈrɪd(ə)lər Mullen forces us to act and react as language's riddlers and addicts: ‘as shadow as promised/as drinking fountain as well/as grassfire as myself/as mirror as is/as never as this.’ Example sentencesExamples - Logically speaking, the additional information is essential for the answer the riddler wants.
Origin Old English rǣdels, rǣdelse 'opinion, conjecture, riddle'; related to Dutch raadsel, German Rätsel, also to read. read from Old English: Alfred the Great, king of Wessex between 871 and 899, did much to promote education in his kingdom, and the word read is first found in his writings. The word goes back to a Germanic root meaning ‘advise, guess, interpret’, and Old English riddle comes from the same root. The three Rs (early 19th century) have been ‘reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic’, regarded as the fundamentals of elementary education. The expression is said to have originated as a toast proposed by the banker and politician Sir William Curtis (1752–1829). Read my lips was most famously used by the first President Bush in 1998. In making a campaign pledge not to raise taxes, he said ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ If you want to give someone a severe warning or reprimand, you may read the riot act to them. The Riot Act was passed by the British government in 1715 to prevent civil disorder in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of that year. The Act made it an offence for a group of twelve or more people to refuse to disperse within an hour of being ordered to do so, after a magistrate had read a particular section of the Act to them. This created something of a problem, as reading legal language aloud is not the easiest thing to do in the middle of a genuine riot—and defendants might claim later that they had not heard the key words. The Act failed to prevent a number of major disturbances over the years, but was not repealed until 1967. Riot (Middle English) originally meant dissolute living and comes from an Old French word meaning ‘to quarrel’.
Rhymes fiddle, griddle, kiddle, Liddell, middle, piddle, twiddle verb ˈrɪd(ə)lˈrɪdl [with object]1Make many holes in (someone or something), especially with gunshot. his car was riddled by sniper fire Example sentencesExamples - For a start, the enclosures are riddled with bullet holes.
- As you say, almost all software vendors do very shoddy work, and most large systems are riddled with holes.
- The bacterial onslaught changes the bone by riddling it with tiny holes.
- He noted that each of their bodies was riddled with bullet holes.
- An ammunition box inside a Huey helicopter that crashed in 1968 is riddled with bullet holes from ammunition that exploded inside during the ensuing fire.
- A 19-year-old man was killed and four other people, including a pregnant woman, were injured when their car was riddled with bullets by the soldiers.
- However, these arguments are riddled with holes.
- If you stop to think about it, the film is riddled with such holes - why for example does nobody actually catch the virulent super-virus from either of the unfortunate characters injected with it?
- The hydrants were not working and the hoses the fire officers were using to extinguish the blaze were riddled with holes.
- But actually this bedrock is riddled with minute holes.
- Around them, the walls were riddled with bullet holes.
- As if the tonal mess weren't enough, the movie is riddled with plot holes that wreak increasing confusion.
- The truck was riddled with shrapnel holes and shards had punctured the fuel drums of two Challenger tanks.
- A tree's roots had grown into the dam, and it was riddled with holes and in a very precarious condition.
- The jaws are riddled with small holes through which nerve bundles can relay electrical messages from the domes to the brain.
- The gunshot riddled body was in the driver's seat.
- Tables were riddled with bullet holes and the entire place was splattered with blood.
- Inside, one of the bodies was riddled with bullet holes and had clearly been executed.
- Walls inside the restaurant were riddled with holes, wires dangled from the ceiling, and clusters of pipes were exposed.
- A year later, he is physically healed, but his memory is riddled with holes.
Synonyms perforate, hole, make/put/punch holes in, pierce, penetrate, puncture, honeycomb, pepper prick, gore, bore through, transfix - 1.1 Fill or permeate (someone or something), especially with something undesirable.
the existing law is riddled with loopholes her body was riddled with arthritis Example sentencesExamples - Sumptuous maybe, but these programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say.
- It's a crumbling organisation that's riddled with police informers, drug dealers and pimps.
- Malcolm Chapman, a former non-executive of Semple, said: ‘The document is so riddled with errors it is barely worth commenting on.’
- Society is riddled with the cancer of crime and addiction and we can all agree that it is not getting any better.
- She talks about how the whole country was riddled with informers.
- Braedon helped out Hannah quite often, since the old woman was riddled with arthritis and unable to perform even the most basic tasks unaided.
- A review of the number of prisoners on the run has been ordered after it emerged the current list is riddled with mistakes and includes inmates who might be dead or were at large as far back as the 1980s.
- It riddles you like the most aggressive cancer, filling every pore, every nook and cranny.
- The 76-year-old from Southend Road, Wickford, was tricked into believing his roof was riddled with woodworm and in danger of collapsing without major repair work.
- The commentary and the questions were riddled with cliches, speculation and posturing - all very earnest but ultimately meaningless and confusing.
- The account of a former Congress employee would suggest that management of the health care organisation is riddled with nepotism, corruption and incompetence.
- It is not Labour policy to freeze prescription charges and review a system that is riddled with anomalies.
- He discovered that the army's design calculations were riddled with flaws and mistaken assumptions, but these were ‘self-cancelling’.
- If a novel was riddled with the flat-footed cliches that plague so many science books, the critics would skewer it.
- It is simply impossible to have a death penalty - the judiciary are riddled with prejudices and the judicial system is filled with flaws, and innocent people will be executed.
- His reasoning on wages, even without the nonsense about education and swearing, is less sound, riddled as it is with dubious comparative references to other people's earnings.
- Highlights include just about every fight sequence, riddled as they are with traditional moves, wire work and a lot of cheeky CGI that makes this more fun than a Jackie Chan flick, but still respectful of the genre.
- It was riddled with informers and Lenin spent the majority of his time engaged in internal disputes with other socialists.
- He essentially created that culture, riddled as it was with hypocrisy.
- The rebels attack remote western provinces whose local governments are riddled with corruption, inefficiency and the effects of a cruel caste system.
Synonyms permeate, suffuse, fill, pervade, spread through, imbue, inform, charge, saturate, overrun, take over, overspread, infiltrate, run through, filter through, be diffused through, invade, beset, pester, plague
2Pass (a substance) through a large coarse sieve. for final potting, the soil mixture is not riddled Example sentencesExamples - A day and a half of digging and riddling had produced several piles of authentic clayish undersoil (known as sammel and by various other names in areas where Regia membership is high).
- This was put to use every autumn to power the large and venerable threshing machine, with its elevator and shaking, riddling sieves.
- Made of some combination of tannins, bentonites, gelatines, or alginates, they help to produce a uniform skin-like yeast deposit that does not stick to the glass but slips easily down it during the riddling process.
- Brown observed to Poole that the miners could typically make the same or slightly more money and produce more coal per day, saved as they were the labor of riddling.
Synonyms sieve, sift, strain, screen, filter, purify, refine, winnow archaic bolt, griddle - 2.1 Remove ashes or other unwanted material from (something, especially a fire or stove) with a sieve.
she heard Mr Evans riddling the fire
noun ˈrɪd(ə)lˈrɪdl A large coarse sieve, especially one used for separating ashes from cinders or sand from gravel. Example sentencesExamples - For inside the mill, the shelling stones began to turn, the riddles (large-meshed sieves) rhythmically shook and the millstones ground round and round.
- I then re-sieve it through a maggot riddle to remove the lumps.
Origin Late Old English hriddel, of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Latin cribrum 'sieve', cernere 'separate', and Greek krinein 'decide'. nounˈridlˈrɪdl 1A question or statement intentionally phrased so as to require ingenuity in ascertaining its answer or meaning, typically presented as a game. Example sentencesExamples - She was pleased at herself as if she had just figured out a riddle.
- He regarded Haley with a critical eye, as if figuring out a riddle.
- Aspiring suitors have to answer three ridiculous riddles of the sort that do the rounds in Dublin pubs.
- Fleur plays Princess Turandot, declaring that she will marry the man who correctly answers her three riddles, while those who fail will be killed.
- Hamlet asks the gravediggers who is to be buried, but he receives riddles instead of answers.
- Her echo bounced from wall to wall, penetrating his ears like an unsolvable riddle.
- Midnight had arrived, but Leander still hadn't figured out the riddle.
- Some of the pictures are fascinating in that the images seem to pose little visual riddles.
- Shorter answers every other question with a riddle and punctuates his conversation with statements such as ‘The only constant is change.’
- During the latest bachelor party, a man in an ape suit served as master of ceremonies as guests were required to answer a series of riddles.
- Many of Vermeer's paintings appear to pose riddles as to who sees whom and what, when.
- Old Zen riddle: if a policy is announced and no one hears it, is it really announced?
- If you fail to answer his riddles correctly, you will not be allowed safe passage through the forest.
- Calaf is mesmerized by the princess' beauty and resolves to answer her three riddles and win her hand.
- Rob's words echoed through my brain, and they sounded like some cryptic riddle.
- Answer the riddle, and your life shall be spared.
- A prize that I will get if, and only if, I solve the secret riddle.
- Bilbo's next riddle is answered but he has trouble with Gollum's.
- Here's a zen riddle: How lumpy must a sauce be before it can be called a vegetable?
- Many riddles were embedded in rhymes, playfully disguising answers in metaphors and analogies.
- 1.1 A person, event, or fact that is difficult to understand or explain.
Example sentencesExamples - Advancing age has occasionally brought resolution, more often just a little understanding, to many of these riddles, but not necessarily to the resilient ambiguity of history.
- They were words she could not understand, but still she searched among them for some clue, some answer to the riddle of her life.
- Through Christ and in Christ, the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful.
- Whatever helps understand this riddle is significant, I am pleased that I, in a small way, did something with it.
- Yes, their coquettishness and evasions can exasperate men looking for an unequivocal answer to riddles of life and love.
- Perhaps, to answer the riddle posed by the Palace substitution script, we should take a similar path.
- Each of us is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
- But no one has answered the related riddle: Who wins if both sides bring their voters to the polls in record numbers?
- But Grinsell was writing before the invention of radiocarbon dating - surely here was the chance to answer the riddle of the round skull?
- The grieving friends of a York man who drowned in mysterious circumstances have launched a campaign to solve the riddle of his death.
- Whatever the answer to the riddle of quantum reality, the correct assessment of the role and meaning of observers in the Universe must await the outcome of the confrontation of the Cosmos with the quantum.
- A set of hypotheses has been suggested to explain this exceptional riddle of fish reproduction, but as yet they remain untested.
- The first answer to the riddle of existence, therefore, is that substance exists, and exists necessarily.
- His experiments on the lift and drag of an aircraft helped answer the riddle of how birds fly and led to new wing designs.
- Cold comfort for the grieving Parks, who is now trying to solve the riddle of his granddaughter's death.
- Not only has it helped to explain life's innermost riddles, but it has posed challenging questions about human behaviour and ethics, and offered controversial new technologies.
- But only one asset will help us crack the US interest rate riddle: patience.
- Earlier this year, it had sat for weeks to unravel the riddle of the sinking.
- Understanding exactly what capital is unlocks the riddle of the market system.
- Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution.
Synonyms puzzle, conundrum, brain-teaser, chinese puzzle, problem, unsolved problem, question, poser, enigma, mystery, quandary, paradox
verbˈridlˈrɪdl [no object]archaic 1Speak in or pose riddles. he who knows not how to riddle Example sentencesExamples - The clown Feste has incurred Olivia's displeasure by a long absence, but contrives to regain her favour by riddling that she is more foolish than he for mourning that her brother is in Heaven.
- Small touches in each of these short stories illustrate Edgeworth's use of codes and riddling.
- 1.1with two objects Solve or explain (a riddle) to (someone)
Phrases talk (or speak) in riddles Express oneself in an ambiguous or puzzling manner. Example sentencesExamples - Sorry if it sounds like I'm talking in riddles here.
- There were reports of a permanently stoned Perry walking backwards and talking in riddles while striking the ground with a hammer.
- The members start wearing fancy dress and talking in riddles and inventing elaborate codes of conduct.
- He speaks in riddles; no one understands a word he says.
- He speaks in riddles, shrouds his decisions in mystery, never gives individual interviews and is so paranoid at being misquoted that he refuses to have his sphinx-like utterances translated into English.
- Would you please just stop talking in riddles?
- Pleat preferred to talk in riddles about the future of the club rather than the game, which Spurs won thanks to two fine individual goals.
- Out of respect to tradition, I always make a point of speaking in riddles or of burying my very best prophecies in a set of casual, seemingly off-hand remarks.
- Anyone walking through the Looking Glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn't so common.
- I point out that I'm here to find out stuff, not talk in riddles.
Origin Old English rǣdels, rǣdelse ‘opinion, conjecture, riddle’; related to Dutch raadsel, German Rätsel, also to read. verbˈridlˈrɪdl [with object]1usually be riddledMake many holes in (someone or something), especially with gunshot. his car was riddled by sniper fire Example sentencesExamples - The jaws are riddled with small holes through which nerve bundles can relay electrical messages from the domes to the brain.
- The gunshot riddled body was in the driver's seat.
- But actually this bedrock is riddled with minute holes.
- A 19-year-old man was killed and four other people, including a pregnant woman, were injured when their car was riddled with bullets by the soldiers.
- Inside, one of the bodies was riddled with bullet holes and had clearly been executed.
- The hydrants were not working and the hoses the fire officers were using to extinguish the blaze were riddled with holes.
- However, these arguments are riddled with holes.
- Around them, the walls were riddled with bullet holes.
- Tables were riddled with bullet holes and the entire place was splattered with blood.
- Walls inside the restaurant were riddled with holes, wires dangled from the ceiling, and clusters of pipes were exposed.
- The truck was riddled with shrapnel holes and shards had punctured the fuel drums of two Challenger tanks.
- For a start, the enclosures are riddled with bullet holes.
- A year later, he is physically healed, but his memory is riddled with holes.
- He noted that each of their bodies was riddled with bullet holes.
- An ammunition box inside a Huey helicopter that crashed in 1968 is riddled with bullet holes from ammunition that exploded inside during the ensuing fire.
- The bacterial onslaught changes the bone by riddling it with tiny holes.
- If you stop to think about it, the film is riddled with such holes - why for example does nobody actually catch the virulent super-virus from either of the unfortunate characters injected with it?
- As you say, almost all software vendors do very shoddy work, and most large systems are riddled with holes.
- As if the tonal mess weren't enough, the movie is riddled with plot holes that wreak increasing confusion.
- A tree's roots had grown into the dam, and it was riddled with holes and in a very precarious condition.
Synonyms perforate, hole, make holes in, punch holes in, put holes in, pierce, penetrate, puncture, honeycomb, pepper - 1.1 Fill or permeate (someone or something), especially with something unpleasant or undesirable.
the existing law is riddled with loopholes Example sentencesExamples - It is not Labour policy to freeze prescription charges and review a system that is riddled with anomalies.
- Highlights include just about every fight sequence, riddled as they are with traditional moves, wire work and a lot of cheeky CGI that makes this more fun than a Jackie Chan flick, but still respectful of the genre.
- Society is riddled with the cancer of crime and addiction and we can all agree that it is not getting any better.
- Malcolm Chapman, a former non-executive of Semple, said: ‘The document is so riddled with errors it is barely worth commenting on.’
- Sumptuous maybe, but these programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say.
- Braedon helped out Hannah quite often, since the old woman was riddled with arthritis and unable to perform even the most basic tasks unaided.
- The 76-year-old from Southend Road, Wickford, was tricked into believing his roof was riddled with woodworm and in danger of collapsing without major repair work.
- The account of a former Congress employee would suggest that management of the health care organisation is riddled with nepotism, corruption and incompetence.
- She talks about how the whole country was riddled with informers.
- It is simply impossible to have a death penalty - the judiciary are riddled with prejudices and the judicial system is filled with flaws, and innocent people will be executed.
- The commentary and the questions were riddled with cliches, speculation and posturing - all very earnest but ultimately meaningless and confusing.
- It was riddled with informers and Lenin spent the majority of his time engaged in internal disputes with other socialists.
- His reasoning on wages, even without the nonsense about education and swearing, is less sound, riddled as it is with dubious comparative references to other people's earnings.
- A review of the number of prisoners on the run has been ordered after it emerged the current list is riddled with mistakes and includes inmates who might be dead or were at large as far back as the 1980s.
- It's a crumbling organisation that's riddled with police informers, drug dealers and pimps.
- He discovered that the army's design calculations were riddled with flaws and mistaken assumptions, but these were ‘self-cancelling’.
- If a novel was riddled with the flat-footed cliches that plague so many science books, the critics would skewer it.
- The rebels attack remote western provinces whose local governments are riddled with corruption, inefficiency and the effects of a cruel caste system.
- He essentially created that culture, riddled as it was with hypocrisy.
- It riddles you like the most aggressive cancer, filling every pore, every nook and cranny.
Synonyms permeate, suffuse, fill, pervade, spread through, imbue, inform, charge, saturate, overrun, take over, overspread, infiltrate, run through, filter through, be diffused through, invade, beset, pester, plague
2Pass (a substance) through a large coarse sieve. for final potting, the soil mixture is not riddled Example sentencesExamples - A day and a half of digging and riddling had produced several piles of authentic clayish undersoil (known as sammel and by various other names in areas where Regia membership is high).
- This was put to use every autumn to power the large and venerable threshing machine, with its elevator and shaking, riddling sieves.
- Brown observed to Poole that the miners could typically make the same or slightly more money and produce more coal per day, saved as they were the labor of riddling.
- Made of some combination of tannins, bentonites, gelatines, or alginates, they help to produce a uniform skin-like yeast deposit that does not stick to the glass but slips easily down it during the riddling process.
Synonyms sieve, sift, strain, screen, filter, purify, refine, winnow - 2.1 Remove ashes or other unwanted material from (something, especially a fire or stove) with a sieve.
nounˈridlˈrɪdl A large coarse sieve, especially one used for separating ashes from cinders or sand from gravel. Example sentencesExamples - For inside the mill, the shelling stones began to turn, the riddles (large-meshed sieves) rhythmically shook and the millstones ground round and round.
- I then re-sieve it through a maggot riddle to remove the lumps.
Origin Late Old English hriddel, of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Latin cribrum ‘sieve’, cernere ‘separate’, and Greek krinein ‘decide’. |