Round as an Apple, Deep as a Cup -Daily Riddle

This little rhyme has been fooling children since at least the Victorian era. Don’t fall for the obvious answer.

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What is as round as an apple, as deep as a cup, and all the king’s horses cannot pull it up?

The mention of king’s horses sends every mind in one direction. The real answer goes the other way.

Click to Reveal the Answer

A Well 🪣

It is round at the top, deep like a giant cup, and no team of horses can pull a hole out of the ground.

A Riddle from the Nursery Shelf

This is a classic English nursery rhyme that has been passed down for at least two centuries. It appears in many Mother Goose collections, including The Real Mother Goose (1916), the much-loved edition illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright. The answer is a well. It works as a riddle because a well’s mouth is roughly round, its shaft drops down like an enormous cup, and you cannot pull a hole out of the ground no matter how many horses you hitch to it.

Mother Goose and the Village Well

Mother Goose herself is not a real person but a catch-all name for the body of English children’s verse that started being collected and printed in the 1700s. The earliest known book was Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book in 1744, and the name Mother Goose came into use a few decades later through John Newbery’s Mother Goose’s Melody. Many of these rhymes are much older than the books themselves, passed mouth to mouth for generations. The well belongs to that older world. In the centuries before plumbing, every village green and farmyard had one, and children grew up watching buckets drop into the dark and come back full of cold water. It was the most ordinary round, deep thing in their lives.

The Sleight of Hand

The cleverness of the rhyme is in that little phrase about the king’s horses. It steers your mind straight to picturing something fragile and shattered. But the answer is the opposite of fragile: it is a hole. The horses cannot pull it up because there is nothing solid to pull on. It teaches a useful lesson too. Sometimes the thing you are looking for is not a thing at all, but the shape of an absence.