Definition

Enigmatic is an adjective that describes something that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand.

Pronunciation

US English

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Excerpts from News Articles

Overall, archaeologists have found a total of some 900 rock carvings, or “petroglyphs,” at Al Jassasiya. They are mostly enigmatic cup marks arranged in various patterns, including rows and rosettes, but also eye-catching representations of sailing ships, usually seen from above but also depicted in linear profile, among other symbols and signs.

Logo 2021-11-22 CNN News

Federal data on the overall impact of gun violence is lacking. Even obtaining the basic numbers can be a challenge, as I learned writing this article. While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dashboards for Covid-19 and mpox, gun violence is still an enigma for the public health community. That’s in large part due to the Dickey amendment, which, in 1996, made it challenging and potentially financially punitive for the CDC to conduct or fund research on gun violence if it were to be used in any way to promote gun control.

Logo 2022-06-08 CNN News

Don’t be alarmed! The pages frankly fly by—in fact, I wish there were more. It’s the story of all the people left behind after one beautiful, brilliant, and enigmatic woman disappears—her husband Martin, a publisher in Gothenberg, their friend Gustav, a famous painter whose works so often feature her face, and her daughter Rakel, who may or may not have discovered a clue that might lead to her mother’s whereabouts. This is a big, compelling family drama that’s also a mystery, and also a treatise on art and artmaking and friendship and getting older, and it will suck you in and refuse to let go.

Logo 2023-01-12 Literary Hub

The enigmatic , future-focused author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is a frequent target of right-wing book bans. But if conservatives were interested in taking a holistic look at her work, they’d probably find things they like — or, at least, things they could cynically interpret for their benefit. Hurston’s writing — as a Black woman openly grappling with her Blackness — seemingly provides just such an opportunity.

Logo 2023-02-14 MSNBC News

NAVALNY is presented by CNN Films and HBO Max and explores the attempted assassination of enigmatic Russian anti-corruption campaigner and former presidential candidate, Alexey Navalny. In a riveting account that unwinds like a real-life thriller, director Daniel Roher methodically documents the careful research and analysis that unmasked Navalny’s would-be killers, and why they sought to kill the man Vladimir Putin apparently considers a serious threat to his power.

Logo 2023-03-12 CNN News

The enigmatic thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, continues to capture people’s attention. The size of a wolf, it was officially declared extinct in its last stronghold in Tasmania. Lost before it was ever appreciated or studied, the thylacine is known only from anecdotes.

Logo 2023-03-19 The Conversation

Congress may also take the opportunity to get to know the enigmatic tech leader a bit more, as it will be one of the only public appearances he has ever made in the US despite TikTok having more than 150 million US users.

Logo 2023-03-22 The Independent

Quarks and their quirks One particle that particularly interests Bellee and her coworkers is the B-meson. To understand this subatomic enigma , you need to zero in on the fundamental building blocks of matter: quarks. Quarks are the basic components of protons and neutrons.

Logo 2023-03-27 CGTN

Created by and for the enigmatic emperor Qin Shi Huang, they were discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974.

Logo 2023-03-30 CGTN

One key piece of the enigma : Women lose sexual hormones such as estrogen when they undergo menopause, either naturally through the body’s decreased production or by removal of the ovaries via surgery. However, just how the loss of those hormones and the impact of hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, affects dementia risk is also unclear.

Logo 2023-04-03 CNN News

This enigmatic double portrait, commonly known as The Arnolfini Portrait, is set in the bedchamber of a Flemish house and is unique to Netherlandish art. The couple depicted are usually identified as Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, a wealthy merchant from Lucca living in Bruges, and his wife, Giovanna Cenami, although this is questioned by some scholars.


On the other hand, Connecticut absorbed every lesson throughout its 31-8 season. Lightly regarded during the preseason, the Huskies won their first 14 games, only to lose six of eight during a flummoxing midseason swoon. They learned how to be successful and how not to handle success. Then they recovered. The experience made them ready for every strange thing this tournament could hurl at them. In a field of enigmas , they know exactly who they were.

Logo 2023-04-04 The Washington Post

Next, to ancient Greece and Sarah Underwood’s Lies We Sing to the Sea (Electric Monkey). In the kingdom of Ithaca, 12 girls must be hanged each spring to appease Poseidon. When Leto awakes from her death, the enigmatic Melantho reveals her destiny: to kill the last prince of Ithaca and destroy the curse. Inspired by the fate of Penelope’s maids in Homer’s The Odyssey, this is a lavish epic of power, vengeance, love and fate.

Logo 2023-04-04 The Guardian

This is an enigma we’re tackling in the fifth episode of our Great Mysteries of Physics podcast – hosted by me, Miriam Frankel, science editor at The Conversation, and supported by FQxI, the Foundational Questions Institute.

Logo 2023-04-05 The Conversation

As in any good thriller, the assassination of Tatarsky boasts a cast of colorful characters, an enigmatic figure at the center, rollercoaster twists and turns, as well as distracting sub-plots delaying the denouement.

Logo 2023-04-06 Politico

In my newest horror novel In Nightfall, I knew I wanted to pull some inspiration from vampire classic The Lost Boys. Siblings forced to move to a beach town with a single parent, enigmatic locals inducting you into their weird bloody beach cult, and a grandparent who knows way more than they’re willing to say. But in the idyllic town of Nightfall, it’s not the dark you need to be afraid of. It’s the beautiful, vicious, and unapologetically violent teenage girls.

Logo 2023-04-07 Literary Hub

The artist's 2018 photo book "Lux Noctis" is in the collections of the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and he has shot commercial work for Apple, Audi and Google as well as the DJ and music producer Zedd. Last summer, Wu revealed a colossal project for National Geographic: a cover story and timelapse multimedia piece about Stonehenge, which featured the enigmatic monument lit by his custom drones. In November, one of his NFTs, a 4K video loop titled "An Irresistible Force," outperformed its high estimate by over 25% during an auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong, selling at 441,000 HKD (about {$}56,500).

Logo 2023-04-09 CNN News

Her mind turns to the woodlands of her native Pennsylvania, which contain circles, too: tree rings, fairy rings. Circular thinking, dislocation, entrapment: these are the themes of a novel detailing HD’s own early adult life, her poetic and queer awakening, and her struggles to be heard over the cacophony of her volatile fiance, Ezra Pound, and her enigmatic lover, Frances Gregg. Written in 1927, by which time HD was living in Europe with her female partner, Bryher, HERmione remained unpublished throughout the author’s life and was found among the papers she bequeathed to Yale University in 1960.

Logo 2023-04-09 The Guardian

For decades, scientists have debated the nature and origin of what some experts consider the most anomalous and enigmatic layer of Earth’s deep interior: the boundary between its scorching hot liquid outer core and the solid mantle that surrounds it. Wp Get the full experience.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Washington Post

That brilliantly enigmatic video of the break-up shows a self-destruction, and in the case of 'Mythologies', it now feels rather apt. Gone are the electronic dance tracks that irrevocably changed the sound of modern pop. They blew up and are replaced by a sprawling 90-minute composition that represents quite the whiplash-inducing musical pivot.

Logo 2023-04-11 EURO News

But Muluneh's images are more enigmatic than direct. World events are rarely neat, and Muluneh resists the idea that open discussions mean having to take hardline stances.

Logo 2023-04-12 CNN News

Fleming picked up inspiration everywhere. Godfrey became the model for M. Fleming’s secretary, Joan Howe, inspired Moneypenny. The Soviet SMERSH coding device in From Russia, With Love (1957) was based on the German Enigma machine. Many of Fleming’s characters were named for real people: one villain shares a name with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, another with one of Fleming’s schoolyard adversaries.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Conversation

Soo, a “Hamilton” original cast member, recently seen as Sarah Brown in the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage revival of “Guys and Dolls,” reaffirms with “Camelot” her ascendance as a Broadway star. Her Guenevere enigmatically stirs the theater air. What this unhappy queen truly wants is the one intriguingly unsettled mystery in a “Camelot” that conjures anything but wonder.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

Niri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish auteur and Palme winner known for his sober and enigmatic dramas and tragedies, comes to Cannes with his new film, forbiddingly entitled About Dry Grasses, about a young teacher in a remote village pining for a new big-city career in Istanbul. Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, starring Léa Drucker, is an explicit study of sexual transgression, remade from May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

And lo, because Netflix’s new four-part “erotic thriller” filling in the recently vacated Sex/Life slot is based on Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage, it comes to pass. Damage, readers of a certain age will remember, was the following year made into a film starring Jeremy Irons as the infatuated older man, Juliette Binoche as the enigmatic femme fatale and Miranda Richardson stealing the whole show as the shattered wife and mother.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

"We think bats probably evolved from a small, tree-dwelling, insectivorous mammal," Jones said. "But there are a number of enigmatic fossil insectivores from around the time bats would have evolved and it's unclear which, if any, are related to bats."

Logo 2023-04-13 Reuters

Ian Fleming’s third Bond novel introduces us to one of his most compelling female characters – Gala Brand, an Special Branch undercover agent embedded with Hugo Drax: scientist, patriot and enigmatic millionaire, whose loyalty to Britain has come into sharp question. Brand is a capable agent whose first reaction to Bond is simply that he’ll mess up her mission: ‘Commander Bond.

Logo 2023-04-13 Literary Hub

“It’s a fine line because there’s ‘being open to speculative ideas’ like this, but that can be translated into an actual supporting of this possibility, and I think that’s where there needs to be more clarity,” said Alejandro Rojas, a board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank exploring unidentified aerial phenomena, and head of content and research for Enigma Labs, a start-up using machine learning to investigate UFO data.

Logo 2023-04-14 Politico

Much has been said about her smile and gaze, but viewers still might wonder what all the fuss is about. Along with the mysteries of the sitter’s identity and her enigmatic look, the reason for the work’s popularity is one of its many conundrums. Although many theories have attempted to pinpoint one reason for the art piece’s celebrity, the most compelling arguments insist that there is no one explanation.


The artist’s remarkable talent, especially his keenness of observation and creative imagination, was already revealed in the angel he contributed to Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1472–75): Leonardo endowed the angel with natural movement, presented it with a relaxed demeanour, and gave it an enigmatic glance that both acknowledges its surroundings while remaining inwardly directed. In Leonardo’s landscape segment in the same picture, he also found a new expression for what he called “nature experienced”: he reproduced the background forms in a hazy fashion as if through a veil of mist.


Siddal is much better known as the Pre-Raphaelites’ ethereal, enigmatic muse and Rossetti’s wife. With tumbling auburn hair and a pale, delicate face, she perfectly embodied the group’s aesthetic ideals.

Logo 2023-04-15 EURO News

It appeared that the Rooneys had fallen victim to the rare and enigmatic phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.


Both are accepted to the summer programme at the elite Telluride Association and both gain entry to Yale. But once again Laudor seems to take the intimidating environment in his stride, becoming one of those charismatic figures around whom undergraduate legends continually sprout. He is eccentric and enigmatic by turns, sleeping at odd hours, staying up all night, one moment utterly distracted, the next totally engaged.

Logo 2023-04-16 The Guardian

In the hospital, Poe continued to drift in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and speaking nonsense when he was awake. On October 7 he died. A Baltimore newspaper reported enigmatically that the cause had been “congestion of the brain.”


Humans have traveled to one of those mysterious corners in the Mariana Trench, the deepest-known ocean trench on the planet extending about 36,000 feet deep. In one journey into the trench seven years ago, deep-sea scientists dove 12,000 of those feet to an area known as Enigma Seamount, nicknamed as such because they didn’t know much about it. They identified a stunningly beautiful jellyfish called the hydromedusa, just a preview of the unexplored life on Earth.

Logo 2023-04-20 The Washington Post