The answer is a cold.
Here’s the riddle: “What can you catch, but never throw?”
Work it through, because this one is a word trick wearing a sports costume. Your brain hears “catch” and “throw” and immediately pictures a ball — and that’s exactly the trap. A ball fails the riddle instantly: anything you can catch in the ballpark sense, you can throw right back. So the answer can’t be a physical object at all.
“Catch” has a second meaning, and it’s the one doing all the work here: you catch a cold. You don’t grab it out of the air — you come down with it, passed from someone else, the way people have “caught” colds forever. And once you have it? You cannot throw it. There is no throwing a cold — you can pass it along, unfortunately, but nobody in history has ever wound up and thrown one.
That’s why a cold is the unique answer: it’s the classic thing English lets you catch that no hands, no arms and no aim can ever throw. The oldest trick question in the book — and it still gets everybody, because the ball is just too easy to picture.
Did the ball trap you, or did the sniffles give it away? Drop your first guess in the comments — and try tomorrow’s riddle on our page.
