Mr. Smith Had 4 Daughters: Try to Solve the Viral Riddle
Updated: Apr. 02, 2024
"Mr. Smith had four daughters" is a viral Facebook riddle that has everyone stumped. Check out the detailed answer here!
If you’re on Facebook or other social media, you might have seen a popular riddle or two going around. A few of the trickiest ones have gone viral, like the “Mr. Smith had four daughters” riddle. Many people have been totally stumped by this riddle, and they want to know what it means. However, a lot of those social media posts are missing the No. 1 thing you want when you’re trying to solve a challenging riddle—the answer! Here, we’ve provided the riddle of “Mr. Smith had four daughters” in full, along with the answer and an explanation. You’ll still have to figure it out, but you can check to see if your reasoning was correct. (No cheating!)
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The “Mr. Smith had four daughters” riddle
The riddle reads as follows: Mr. Smith had four daughters. Each of his daughters has a brother. How many children does Mr. Smith have?
This is a deceptively tricky riddle! If your first thought was that Mr. Smith has eight children, you’re not alone. Lots of people think that each daughter has one brother, making four daughters and four brothers, which equals eight children. But nope, that’s not right! The riddle seems like a math test on the surface, but it’s actually all about reading comprehension.
The answer to the “Mr. Smith had four daughters” riddle
The answer to the riddle is … five. Mr. Smith has five children. Each of his daughters has a brother, but they all share the same brother. Therefore, four daughters plus one brother equals five children in total. Grammar nerds might have gotten this one right before math lovers!
Of course, it’s called the “Mr. Smith had four daughters” riddle, so you could interpret that past tense “had” in two ways: First, that Mr. Smith had four daughters—i.e., that four daughters were born to him. Or you could read it to mean that Mr. Smith used to have four daughters but now has none, in which case the answer to how many children he had might be zero. However, the more commonly accepted interpretation is the first one: that Mr. Smith has four daughters and one son, making five children in total.
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Originally Published: June 01, 2021
