The answer is a comb.
Here’s the riddle: “I have teeth but I cannot bite. What am I?”
Work it through, because this one is a word trick hiding in your bathroom drawer. Your brain hears “teeth” and “bite” and immediately pictures a mouth — an animal, a person, something alive that can chomp. And that’s exactly the trap. Anything with a real mouth full of teeth can bite, so the answer can’t be a living creature at all. The “teeth” have to be teeth in name only.
A comb’s “teeth” are the row of prongs that glide through hair. Look at a comb closely: those prongs line up in a neat row, evenly spaced, exactly like teeth — that’s why we call them teeth. A comb uses them every day, pulling through tangles, smoothing, parting and styling hair. It has a full row of teeth, and it works hard with them.
But a comb has no mouth — and it can’t bite anything. No jaw, no bite, no chomp, ever. It can glide through the thickest hair all morning and never bite once. That’s why a comb is the perfect answer: it genuinely has teeth, in the only sense the word fits, while biting is the one thing it will never do.
Did the animal trap get you, or did you go straight to the hair drawer? Drop your first guess in the comments — and try tomorrow’s riddle on our page.
