Lateral Thinking Riddles With Answers
Updated · Best Riddles With Answers editorial team
Quick answer: Lateral thinking riddles describe an odd situation and ask you to explain it. This page has 42 of them with answers, and each solution follows from the clues once you drop a hidden assumption. Read the scene, question what you took for granted, and check the explanation to see why it fits.
Easy Lateral Thinking Riddles
A man lives on the tenth floor. Every morning he takes the lift to the ground floor. In the evening he rides to the seventh floor and walks up the rest, except on rainy days or when someone is with him, when he rides all the way. Why?
He is too short to reach the button for the tenth floor. He can reach the seventh, and with an umbrella or a friend's help he can reach the top.
A cowboy rode into town on Friday, stayed three days, and rode out on Friday. How?
His horse was named Friday.
In a one-storey house everything is yellow: the walls, the floors, the doors and the furniture. What colour are the stairs?
There are none. A one-storey house has no stairs.
An electric train travels east at 100 kilometres per hour, while the wind blows from the west at 15 kilometres per hour. Which way does its smoke blow?
Nowhere. An electric train makes no smoke.
A boy and his father were hurt in a car crash. The surgeon at the hospital said, 'I can't operate on this boy; he is my son.' How is that possible?
The surgeon is the boy's mother.
A lorry is stuck under a low bridge. The engineers argue about how to remove it, until a child suggests an idea that works without damaging anything. What does she suggest?
Let some air out of the tyres, so the lorry sits lower and slides free.
A beggar asked a rich man for money. The beggar was the rich man's brother, but the rich man did not have a brother. Who was the beggar?
The rich man's sister.
A farmer has three haystacks in one field and four in another. If he puts them all together, how many haystacks does he have?
One, because they all join into a single big haystack.
A boat sank, yet there was not a single person on board. How is that possible?
Everyone on board was married, so there was not a single (unmarried) person aboard.
A man jumped out of an aeroplane with no parachute and was not hurt. How?
The aeroplane was parked on the ground.
A goat is tied to a rope 5 metres long, and its food is 15 metres away, but the goat reaches it easily. How?
The other end of the rope is not tied to anything.
You walk into a cold, dark room with a candle, an oil lamp, a fireplace and just one match. What do you light first?
The match.
Trickier Lateral Thinking Riddles
A man with hiccups asks a barman for a glass of water. The barman suddenly shouts, 'Boo!' The man says thank you and leaves without drinking. Why?
The shock cured his hiccups, so he no longer needed the water.
A woman is reading a book in a completely dark room. There is no light, no screen and no torch, and she understands every word. How?
She is reading Braille with her fingertips.
A man gets a flat tyre and removes four wheel nuts, which fall down a drain. How does he drive away?
He takes one nut from each of the other three wheels and uses those three to fit the spare. Three nuts are enough to drive carefully to a garage.
A shop sells the number 1 for 1 dollar, the number 12 for 2 dollars and the number 123 for 3 dollars. What does it sell?
House numbers. The price is one dollar for each digit.
A lorry driver goes the wrong way down a one way street, passes six police officers, and none of them stops him. Why?
He was not driving. He was walking.
A man leaves home, turns left three times, and on his way back sees two masked men. Who are they?
A baseball catcher and an umpire. He is a batter running the bases around the diamond to home plate.
A man who cannot speak walks into a shop and mimes hammering to buy a hammer. A blind man comes in next and wants to buy scissors. How does he ask?
He simply asks out loud. A blind man can speak.
At a gate, the guard says 'ten' and the first guest answers 'three' and is let in. The guard says 'seven' and the second answers 'five' and enters. The guard says 'nine' and the third answers 'four'. What must you say when the guard says 'twelve'?
Six. Each guest answers with the number of letters in the word the guard said.
A king tells a traveller: 'Make one statement. If it is true you will be sent east, and if it is false you will be sent west.' What statement leaves the king unable to act?
'I will be sent west.' If it is true he must go east, which makes it false, and if it is false he must go west, which makes it true.
Two men stand on opposite banks of a river. They each need to cross, and the only boat takes one person. How do both cross?
Each man needs the other bank. The first rows across and leaves the boat there, and the second then rows it back to where the first began.
Two ropes hang from a high ceiling, too far apart to hold both at once. A man has a pair of pliers. How can he tie the ropes together?
Tie the pliers to one rope and swing it like a pendulum. Hold the other rope and catch the swinging one.
How can you weigh a large elephant when you have no scale big enough?
Float it in a boat and mark the waterline. Take it out, load the boat with stones to the same mark, and weigh the stones.
Hard Lateral Thinking Riddles
You have 50 white marbles, 50 black marbles and two jars. A friend picks a jar at random and then a marble at random from it. How should you arrange the marbles to maximise your chance of white?
Put one white marble in the first jar and all the others in the second. The chance is 1/2 x 1 + 1/2 x 49/99, which is about 75 percent.
An ice cube floats in a full glass of water. When the ice melts, does the water spill over, stay level, or drop?
It stays level and does not spill. The floating ice displaces its own weight in water, which is exactly the volume it becomes when it melts.
A monk climbs a mountain path from 6 am to 6 pm, sleeps at the top, and descends the same path the next day from 6 am to 6 pm, at any speed. Must there be a spot he passes at the same time of day on both trips?
Yes. Picture two monks, one going up and one coming down on the same day. They must meet somewhere, and that spot is the same time on both days.
Three boxes hold two gold coins, two silver coins, and one gold and one silver. You pick a box at random, draw a coin without looking, and it is gold. What is the chance the other coin in the box is also gold?
Two in three. There are three gold coins you could have drawn, all equally likely, and two of them lie in the box with two gold coins.
Three sisters are in a room. Ann is reading a book and Bea is playing chess. What is Cat doing?
Playing chess. Bea cannot play chess alone, so Cat is her opponent.
One clock is stopped and another loses one minute every day. Which is right more often?
The stopped clock, which is right twice a day. The slow clock shows the correct time only once every 720 days.
How can you plant ten trees in five straight rows with four trees in each row?
Plant them at the five points and five crossings of a five-pointed star, so each of its five lines holds four trees.
What is the fewest straight cuts needed to cut a 3 by 3 by 3 cube into 27 small cubes, even if you may move the pieces between cuts?
Six. The small cube in the middle has six faces that no cut has made, and each cut can make only one of them.
A blindfolded person is told that exactly 10 of 100 coins on a table are heads up. They cannot feel which. How can they split the coins into two piles with the same number of heads?
Take any 10 coins for pile A and flip all of them. If pile A had h heads, it now has 10 - h, which is the heads left in the other pile.
A jeweller has four pieces of chain with three links each. Opening a link costs 2 cents and closing it costs 3. How can she join them into one ring most cheaply?
Open the three links of one piece, use them to join the other three pieces into a ring. That is only three openings and three closings.
Quick-Fire Lateral Thinking Riddles
Why can't a man who lives in New York be buried in Boston?
Because he is still alive.
If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, where do you bury the survivors?
Nowhere. Survivors are not buried.
Why might someone put their money in a freezer?
For cold, hard cash.
Which tyre of a car does not turn when the car turns?
The spare.
Which month do soldiers dislike most?
March.
Why can't you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom?
Because the P is silent.
What can you swallow that can also swallow you?
Pride.
How to Solve Lateral Thinking Riddles
A lateral thinking riddle is a story with a hidden assumption. Read each line and ask what you have assumed without being told: is it night, is the person tall enough, is the vehicle moving, are the objects the same size? The answer is usually an ordinary explanation that was out of view, and it must fit every sentence.
Play it as a group. One person reads the story and the others ask yes or no questions until someone names the solution. Good questions narrow the scene, such as asking whether the person is a child, whether a tool is involved or whether the place matters. The reader may only answer yes, no or irrelevant.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is lateral thinking?
Lateral thinking means solving a problem from an unexpected angle instead of following the obvious steps. Puzzles of this kind remove a hidden assumption and let an ordinary explanation fit.
How do you play a lateral thinking puzzle in a group?
One person knows the answer and reads the scene. Everyone else asks yes or no questions, and the reader replies yes, no or irrelevant. The game ends when someone explains the whole situation.
Do lateral thinking riddles have fair answers?
A good one does. The solution should follow from the clues and match every detail. If an answer needs facts the story never hinted at, it is not a good puzzle, and this page avoids those.
How can I get better at lateral thinking?
Practise asking what is assumed. List alternative meanings for each noun and verb, imagine unusual people and places, and read the explanations after each riddle to learn the common tricks.
