Other forms: conundrums
A conundrum is a puzzle with no easy answer. A real conundrum, face a conundrum, an ethical conundrum.
It once meant specifically a riddle turning on a pun, and it has widened to any hard problem where the difficulty is in the situation rather than the calculation. It is slightly playful, which is why it suits a dilemma being discussed rather than suffered. Note that the word's origin is genuinely unknown.
1nounconundrumA puzzle with no easy answer.
“Where to put all our guests in such a small flat is a real conundrum.”
conundrum is a puzzle.
Also accepted in games: riddle
Conundrum appeared in the sixteenth century in several spellings, apparently as mock scholastic Latin. Its true origin is unknown.
A word of unknown origin with several variants, gaining popularity for its burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as hocus-pocus or panjandrum. If there is more to its origin than a nonce coinage, Anatoly Liberman suggests the best theory is that connecting it with the Conimbricenses, 16th c. scholastic commentaries on Aristotle by the Jesuits of Coimbra which indulge heavily in arguments relying on multiple significations of words.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Big Ideas