The riddle
What Has Words but Never Speaks?
Silent until someone reads
A book is full of words, yet it says nothing by itself. It waits on a shelf until a reader opens it and supplies the voice, either silently in the mind or aloud for a listener. That is the heart of the riddle: words and speech are different things. Books have the first and never the second, and the clue "never speaks" is what separates a book from a person.
Leaves and pages
In bookmaking, a leaf is one sheet of paper and a page is one side of it. Each leaf therefore carries two pages, so a book of 300 pages is made of 150 leaves. Next time a book is open on a table, the sheet being turned is a leaf, and the two sides it shows are pages.
Reading it aloud
Read a page aloud and the words finally have a voice, but the voice belongs to the reader. That is why the riddle says the book never speaks, not that it holds no words. A picture book makes a good test: ask who is speaking, the book or the parent turning the pages.
A silent book of another kind
A dictionary also holds words and says nothing, but it holds far more of them than a story does, and it sets them out one after another in a fixed order. Another riddle that hides its answer in plain words is where does today come before yesterday.