The answer is a hole.
Here’s the riddle: “The more of me you take away, the bigger I get. What am I?”
Work it through. A hole isn’t a thing — it’s the absence of a thing, the empty space where material used to be. And that flips the riddle’s trick into plain truth: when you take material away from around a hole, you don’t shrink the hole. You enlarge it. Dig more dirt out, the hole gets bigger. Scoop more out of the middle, the opening widens. The more you take away, the bigger it gets — not as a word game, but by definition. Removing substance is literally how a hole grows.
That’s why the usual guesses all break. Take pieces away from a cake, a pile, or a block of cheese-as-a-solid and the object gets smaller — the riddle only works once you realize the answer is the empty space itself, the one “thing” that grows every single time you remove something from it. (Yes, the cheese guessers were standing right next to the answer — it was the holes in it all along.)
It’s a classic for a reason: true by definition, provable the moment you picture a shovel and a patch of dirt, and it’s the only answer that fits the riddle’s wording exactly.
Did it get you, or did you dig your way to “a hole” straight away? Drop your first (wrong) answer in the comments — cakes get confessed the most — and try tomorrow’s riddle on our page.
Tell us in the comments below - we read every single one, and the best takes get featured.
