Wordplay Riddles and Word Puzzles

I have branches but no leaves, a trunk but no bark, and a head that moves whenever you tell it to. Cut me down and everything I ever held is still there.

Eight of me make a letter. Alone I can only agree or disagree, and I have never once been undecided.

Read me forwards or backwards and I am unchanged. Programmers meet me on their first day of interviews and never quite escape me.

I am always about to happen and I have never once arrived. Plan around me and you will always have time.

I take everything you hand me and give nothing back, yet no program is complete without me. Send me your errors and they vanish without trace.

I am full of keys that open nothing, and every one of my values needs one. Ask me for a key I do not have and I will not complain — I will simply hand you nothing.

I have a head and a tail and no body at all. My head moves whenever you tell it to, and my tail is where everything began.

I am a tree that grows downward from a root nobody planted, my leaves hold everything of value, and I have no wood at all.

You do not write me, you catch me. I have a type, a message and a trace, and I am the only thing here that improves by being loud.

I am a key, but I open nothing. Instead I make sure no two things in the room can ever be confused for one another.

Throwing me away is exactly how you keep what matters. Fail to throw me away and eventually there is no room for anything.

I am the hard outer casing around the kernel, and I hold nothing myself. Speak to me and the machine obeys; misspell one word and it obeys that too.

My name suggests something infernal. In fact I do nothing but wait, patiently and invisibly, for someone to need me.

I have finished everything I was asked to do and I am still listed among the living, purely because nobody has collected my result.

I split one into two, and both halves believe they are the original. Only one number tells them apart.

I carry the output of one thing straight into the mouth of the next, and I never store a drop.

The word was in use long before the incident, but the most famous of me was taped into a logbook in 1947 and had wings.

My name sounds like a treat and I am one pixel across. I am placed on a page for one reason only: so somebody elsewhere learns you opened it.

I crawl everywhere, follow every thread I find, and build something enormous that you use every day without ever seeing me.

I am a mask, and what I hide is how much of an address matters. Slash twenty-four means you are ignoring rather a lot.

Before we say anything of substance, we exchange three brief messages purely to agree that we are both here and both listening.

I pass. Then I fail. Then I pass twice. Nothing about me changed between any of those runs, and I have destroyed more trust in a test suite than any genuine bug ever has.

I am raised and lowered, I decide what happens, and I have never once been made of cloth.

I show you exactly what was there, faithfully, forever — including the parts you deleted and hoped nobody saw.

You deleted me and I am still taking up the space. The directory forgot my name, but something else has not let go of me.

I am spent, refreshed, and occasionally revoked. I am worth nothing to anyone except the exact person holding me, at which point I am worth everything.

I am two colours at the same time, and only one of me is ever visible to anybody. Switching which one is a single decision that takes no time at all.

I leak steadily and deliberately. Pour in faster than I drain and the excess is simply lost — which is the kindest thing I can do to everyone downstream.

Somebody fed me a lie and I believed it completely. Now I repeat that lie confidently to everyone who asks, and I will keep doing so until I forget.

I say nothing at all except that I am still here. Stop hearing me and something else immediately assumes the worst and acts on it.

We lost sight of each other for a moment and both concluded we were now in charge. We each accepted work. Neither of us was wrong, and the data will never fully agree again.

I freeze everything exactly as it was, instantly, without copying any of it. I cost almost nothing until something changes.

You asked me to delete it, so I wrote something down instead. The record of its absence takes up more room than the thing did.

I answer "definitely not" with total certainty and "probably yes" with none at all. I am wrong only in one direction, and that is exactly what makes me useful.

I am handed to you immediately and I contain nothing. Later I will either keep my word or explain why I could not.

Each of us waits for the one before, and we are all written inside one another. By the fifth of us the code has drifted so far right that nobody can read it.

I finished running long ago and I am still holding on to everything I could see at the time. That memory is either my greatest feature or a slow leak.

You are never allowed to touch the real thing, so you argue with my copy instead. Only when you are finished do I quietly work out what actually needs changing.

I start where you clicked and rise through every ancestor above me, and any one of them may quietly decide to stop me.

I am a chart of everything your page had to wait for, drawn as bars that step downward. Anywhere I look like a staircase rather than a wall, something was waiting when it need not have been.

When two of us disagree, we do not argue. We count how specific each of us was, and the more specific one simply wins.

You wrote a rule and it lost, despite being more specific and coming later. I am the reason, and I am invisible unless you know to look.

I mark a place in a list too long to hold. Hand me back and you resume exactly where you stopped, without anybody counting from the beginning.

I ask the same question over and over, and the answer is almost always no. I am wasteful, reliable, and far easier to build than the alternative.

Birds do it seasonally. I do it once, in one direction, and the version of me that claims it can go back usually cannot.

I am doing absolutely nothing, at considerable cost, and I have been doing it for eleven months. Nobody remembers creating me and everyone is afraid to remove me.