The answer is a candle.
Here’s the riddle: “I’m tall when I’m young and short when I’m old. What am I?”
Work it through, because this riddle is a biography told in one sentence. A brand-new candle — a “young” candle — stands at its full height, tall and untouched. But from the moment it’s lit, a candle spends its whole life doing one thing: burning down. The wax melts, the wick shortens, and hour by hour the candle grows steadily shorter as it “ages,” until it ends as a stub and then nothing at all.
That’s why nothing else fits the whole sentence. A person is short when young and tall when grown — the riddle runs the wrong way for us. A tree only grows. A pencil gets shorter, but only when somebody uses it, not simply by aging. Only the candle loses height as a direct result of time passing — its age and its shortness are the same measurement. Tall when young, short when old, guaranteed by the flame.
Did the candle light up for you straight away, or were you stuck on people and trees? Drop your first guess in the comments — and try tomorrow’s riddle on our page.
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