What Goes Up but Never Comes Down?

Why the answer is your age

The question describes motion, so the mind pictures a rocket, a balloon or a kite. Each of those eventually comes down. Your age is the one thing that rises every year and never falls back, and the "up" in the riddle is only a number going higher.

The trick is that "up" is used for an amount, as in prices going up or temperatures going up, rather than for a height. Once you hear it that way, the other candidates drop out one at a time.

Other ways it gets asked

The same riddle turns up in several shapes, and the answer is the same in each.

• What goes up but never comes down?
• What goes up and never comes down?
• What always goes up and never goes down?
• It rises every year and never falls. What is it?

A cousin in a 1903 book

A book of conundrums printed in 1903 (Conundrums, Riddles and Puzzles, by Dean Rivers) asks a related question: "What is everything doing at the same time?" Its answer is "Growing older". The two riddles circle the same idea from different sides, one asking what goes up and the other asking what everything is doing.