riddling

English

Verb

riddling

1. present participle and gerund of riddle
   • 1953 September, “Restoring British Permanent Way to Prewar Standards”, in Railway Magazine, page 584:

     Track work had to be confined largely to the vital aspects of alignment and level, and the finer points of track maintenance, as well as such matters as the riddling and cleaning of ballast, proper care of drainage and formation, cuttings, and embankments, suffered considerable neglect.

Noun

riddling (plural riddlings)

1. Material removed by riddling, or sieving.
   • 1832, The Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, volume 3, page 989:

     The good grain is riddled by hand into a heap at a convenient part of the barn, and the riddlings are thrown among the stuff which descends to the floor through the other spout.

2. The posing or solving of a riddle.
   • 2015, W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism, page 94:

     Hence the laughter of ridicule, whether spontaneous or incited by words, and hence too the laughter of wit, which has an intermediate ancestry in such mental tussles or riddlings as may at one time have taken the place of more savage physical strife.