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PUZZLE definition: 1. a situation that is difficult to understand: 2. a game or toy in which you have to fit separate…. Learn more.
- English (US)
PUZZLE meaning: 1. a situation that is difficult to...
- Znaczenie Puzzle, Definicja W Cambridge English Dictionary
puzzle definicja: 1. a situation that is difficult to...
- Puzzle: Russian Translation
PUZZLE translate: головоломка , трудный вопрос, загадка ,...
- Puzzle: Italian Translation
PUZZLE translate: puzzle, enigma, problema, rendere...
- English (US)
The meaning of PUZZLE is to offer or represent to (someone) a problem difficult to solve or a situation difficult to resolve : challenge mentally; also : to exert (oneself, one's mind, etc.) over such a problem or situation. How to use puzzle in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Puzzle.
A puzzle is a question or problem, intricate enough to be perplexing to the mind; it is sometimes a contrivance made purposely perplexing to test one’s ingenuity: a crossword puzzle; The reason for their behavior remains a puzzle.
A puzzle is a question or problem, intricate enough to be perplexing to the mind; it is sometimes a contrivance made purposely perplexing to test one's ingenuity: a crossword puzzle; The reason for their behavior remains a puzzle.
- Overview
- A history of puzzles
- Puzzle genres
- Puzzle solving: Why are puzzles so popular?
puzzle, a problem that may take many forms, including games and toys, and is solved through knowledge, ingenuity, or other skills. The solver of a puzzle must arrive at the correct answer, or answers, by thinking or putting pieces together in a logical way. There are different genres of puzzles, from word puzzles such as crosswords and number puzzl...
The word puzzle first appeared in print in 1599 in the play The Two Angry Women of Abington by Henry Porter, who used it to describe a state or condition of bewilderment. In its meaning of “a difficult problem or question,” puzzle first makes an appearance in An Antidote Against Atheism, a book by Henry More that was published in 1652. It was not until 1781 that the word puzzle took on the sense of “something devised for the purpose of testing one’s ingenuity,” which is how it was used in James Woodforde’s The Diary of a Country Parson. But puzzles in varying shapes and forms, while not always called puzzles, have shown up throughout history.
Among the earliest documented references to puzzles is one in the Rhind papyrus, compiled by a scribe called Ahmes about 1650 bce. (Its name is derived from the Scottish antiquarian Alexander Henry Rhind, who purchased it in 1858.) The papyrus contains 84 mathematical problems, divided into arithmetic, geometry, and miscellaneous, and it was at its heart a mathematics textbook written in a manner encouraging readers to develop the necessary techniques themselves. According to legend, the ancient city of Thebes in Greece was the home of a sphinx, a creature with the head of a woman and the body of a lion who killed people wishing to enter Thebes. But, to give her victims a chance, she would first pose them a riddle. If they failed to answer it, they were killed. Nobody solved the riddle until Oedipus came along and answered “What goes in the morning upon four feet, in the afternoon upon two feet, and in the evening on three feet?” with the correct response: humankind.
In ancient times puzzles were part of everyday life and stories. The Stomachion puzzle, also called Archimedes’ Box, was a dissection puzzle with a square divided into 14 pieces. It challenged readers to make as many different arrangements as possible. Thanks to computational geometry, it is now known that there are 17,152 solutions. Archimedes’ Box is considered the first recorded tangram, a very popular contemporary puzzle, though it differed in having 14 pieces instead of the 7 pieces of a contemporary tangram. Alexander the Great is known for solving the Gordian knot in 333 bce, when he reached the capital of Phrygia during his conquests. The Gordian knot—now a term for a problem solvable only by bold action—was considered unbeatable until Alexander cut through it with his sword (or, perhaps, removed the pole to which the knot was tied) rather than figuring out how to untie it. The ancient Romans had puzzle locks with secret levers.
Drawings and descriptions of labyrinths and mazes were present in ancient Greece and Rome, the most famous being the mythical Cretan labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. The Cretan labyrinth, known from the legend of the Minotaur, also gave rise to a word important to many modern-day puzzles: clue. This labyrinth was traversed by Theseus with the help of a ball of thread given him by the Cretan princess Ariadne. Clew, meaning ball of thread, evolved into clue.
Alcuin (732–804 ce), a scholar and reformer in the development of Roman Catholicism in western Europe who acted as an adviser to the court of Charlemagne, is known for his puzzles. Several copies of his Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes (“Propositions to Sharpen the Young”) have been found; they include 56 problems. The tone is very playful, and some of the problems have been found to date to earlier times, suggesting that Alcuin was a puzzle collector. Some of his puzzles are classic river-crossing problems (a type of puzzle that remains popular today), such as:
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The history of puzzles has seen multiple genres of puzzles come up over time. Jigsaw puzzles, tangrams, and the Greek Stomachion are examples of tiling puzzles, in which several shapes must be assembled into a larger shape without overlaps. Tiling puzzles are most popularly available in a two-dimensional format, though harder three-dimensional variants are also available.
Mathematical puzzles typically require the solver to find solutions that satisfy one or more conditions. Some math puzzles, like the Bridges of Königsberg, have gone on to define entire fields of study. Logic puzzles are like math puzzles in that the solution must meet a certain set of conditions. Sudoku, which requires the solver to put the numbers 1–9 on a grid while meeting certain criteria, is a logic puzzle. Chess puzzles are a special category in which the rules are determined by the game of chess itself.
The 15-Puzzle is a sliding puzzle. Sliding puzzles challenge a solver to slide pieces along certain routes to reach a desired arrangement of pieces. Mazes, on the other hand, involve a player moving a token across a board; these are called tour puzzles. A special kind of tour puzzle is the hedge maze, where the players themselves must physically move through the maze.
Mechanical puzzles consist of a set of mechanically interlinked pieces in which the solution is achieved through manipulation of the whole object or parts of it. The most famous mechanical puzzle is the Rubik’s cube. Mechanical puzzles include many subgenres—such as disentanglement puzzles, wherein the goal is to disentangle a metal or string loop from an object, and disassembly puzzles, where the solver must open or divide the puzzle into pieces. Japanese puzzle boxes, with their secret opening mechanisms, are part of this category.
Word puzzles, which use a play of words or language to challenge the solver, cover a large range of puzzle types, from crosswords to riddles to word search puzzles. The popular television game show Wheel of Fortune is centred on a word puzzle. Boggle, Scrabble, and Words with Friends are all games based on word puzzles.
Serious puzzle setters often combine different puzzle genres together to make their puzzles harder to solve. Different genres appeal to different kinds of people, and this popularity can be seen in the sheer number of puzzle books and toys in travel shops at airports and train stations.
Lewis Carroll is credited with writing the following about puzzles:
Whenever the Philosophy of Puzzles comes to be fully discussed…, one chief merit of that form of recreation will be declared to be that it offers a bribe to the human intellect…to exert itself, on however trivial a matter, so as not to spend all its waking hours in simple stagnation. All healthy mental games have the same merit.
Puzzles originated as useful learning aids to teach children basic math, as evidenced by so many puzzles centred on weights and measures and distances, all everyday topics and objects that puzzle creators were seeking to enlighten the solver about. They became more widely popular in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, filling up the additional time newly available to people. With the rise of crosswords, word searches, and, more recently, sudoku, they have gone mass-market and are available to almost everyone.
What exercise is to the body, puzzles are to the brain. The rise in popularity of puzzles over time has been accompanied by a score of psychological studies on the effects of puzzle solving on health. Puzzles have been shown to improve memory, drive creativity, and build concentration. Puzzles have been shown to produce dopamine, which in turn improves confidence and increases memory. Some studies, the results of which are inconclusive, also hint at puzzle solving slowing down the aging process. Publication of these studies has in turn driven more people toward puzzle solving.
Many puzzle solvers have a preferred type, or types, of puzzles. Some, such as jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and sudoku, become progressively easier as the solver fills in more and more of the grid, which has contributed to their popularity. Sudoku and other similar puzzles, in addition to having very simple rules, also have a set of standard difficulty levels. The standardization of these levels is possible because they can be solved by computers in a fraction of a second, and thus a difficulty level can be assigned to them. Solvers, in turn, are more engaged because they are interested in conquering the entire range of difficulty levels. While the rise in computing power could be seen as rendering many erstwhile challenging puzzles obsolete, since all it now requires to solve them is a strong algorithm, people continue to show interest in puzzles nevertheless.
On the flip side, sophisticated computer algorithms are now capable of generating puzzles on a mass scale. While this has led to a proliferation of easy-to-create puzzle books in bookshops, as well as puzzle-focused mobile apps, it has also diminished the role of a puzzle creator who crafts customized puzzles and compiles them for a reader. Puzzle setters in the mold of Lewis Carroll continue to exist, but the puzzles they create now occupy the realm of the esoteric. Puzzle aficionados seek out such puzzles, and puzzle groups locally and on the Internet constantly debate newer and harder puzzles. Puzzle solvers seeking to sharpen their minds or fill their free time with puzzles need look no farther than their smartphones or the local bookstore. But, to the enigmatologist (one who studies puzzles), discovering new puzzles is as much of a delightful endeavour as solving them.
PUZZLE meaning: 1. a situation that is difficult to understand: 2. a game or toy in which you have to fit separate…. Learn more.
When you puzzle over a difficult book or the instructions to your new TV, it's like you're trying to piece together a tricky puzzle — a challenging game or problem. The classic puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, a picture that's split into small, oddly-shaped pieces you need to reassemble into a whole.
