conundrum
Americannoun
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conundrums
plural
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a riddle, the answer to which involves a pun or play on words, as What is black and white and read all over? A newspaper.
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anything that puzzles.
noun
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a riddle, esp one whose answer makes a play on words
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a puzzling question or problem
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of conundrum
First recorded in 1590–1600; pseudo-Latin word of obscure origin
Explanation
The tricky word conundrum is used to describe a riddle or puzzle, sometimes including a play on words or pun. One of the most famous conundrums is the riddle of the Sphinx, famously in the play Oedipus the King by Sophocles. Oedipus encounters the Sphinx, a mythical beast, who asks him, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?" The answer is "A person": crawling as a child, walking as an adult, and using a cane in old age. The scary thing is that if the Sphinx asked you the riddle and you didn't know, she'd eat you!
Vocabulary lists containing conundrum
100 Top "SAT" Words
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In a Pickle: Words for When You're in Trouble
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100 SAT words Beginning with "C"
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The television ads case illustrates the conundrum of practical immunity.
From Salon ● Oct. 27, 2026
Where to use last season's top scorer Russo is a conundrum, given she has yet to ignite either as a central striker or in the number 10 role.
From BBC ● Oct. 24, 2026
That’s the conundrum that millions of people your age face.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 13, 2026
That way, the Kane conundrum is likely to be passed on to one of his successors.
From BBC ● Oct. 7, 2026
The one scientist they did revere, if begrudgingly, was Linus Pauling—the larger-than-life Caltech chemist who had recently announced that he had solved an important conundrum in the structure of proteins.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
In this way, “The Savage Mind” means to interrogate the unresolved, even unrecognized, conundrums of identity and race.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026
Re-publishing what had been leaked by Pinto brought legal and ethical conundrums.
From BBC ● Sep. 26, 2026
Their work is a cultural bridge much like Ashitaka’s effort to bring the worlds of beasts and men together for a common cause, depicting what Miyazaki sees as one of humanism’s central conundrums.
From Salon ● Jul. 22, 2026
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode, Emily, John, David, and special guest Stephen Colbert answer listeners’ conundrums of all kinds: the meaningful, the trivial, and the delightfully absurd.
From Slate ● Dec. 18, 2025
The categories of grammar reflect the building blocks of thought—time, space, causality, matter—and a philosophical wordsmith can play with them to awaken her readers to metaphysical conundrums.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
