# enigma

Pronunciation: say "i-NIG-muh" /ɪˈnɪɡmə/

## Noun

1. A person or thing that is puzzling, mysterious, or impossible to explain.
   - Simple: A person or thing that is very hard to understand or explain.
   - _For all his interviews, the reclusive director remains an enigma even to his fans._
   - _The disappearance of the ship remains one of the great enigmas of the sea._
2. A riddle, or a problem that is difficult to solve.
   - Simple: A riddle, or a problem that is very hard to work out.
   - _The puzzle book ends with a clever enigma that few readers ever crack._
   - _The mechanics treated the stalling engine as an enigma to be solved one part at a time._
3. The quality of being mysterious or obscure; a lack of clarity.
   - Simple: The quality of being mysterious or hard to understand.
   - _Much of the poet's early life is wrapped in enigma._
   - _Her smile has an air of enigma that no photograph quite captures._

## Other meanings

- (noun) Riddles and puzzles taken together as a whole.
- (noun) A literary style marked by obscurity and by hints of a transcendental meaning.
- (noun) A protein that regulates protein phosphorylation and has three LIM domains, conserved cysteine- and histidine-rich pairs of adjacent zinc fingers, at its C terminus.

## Origin

αἴνιγμα (aínigma), a verbal noun in Ancient Greek meaning "dark saying, speaking in riddles," gave Latin aenigma ("riddle"), the source of the English word.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/enigma (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).