aenigma

Noun

enigma (countable and uncountable, plural enigmas or enigmata)

1. Something or someone puzzling, mysterious or inexplicable.
   • I was, and still am, an enigma to myself.1894, Abram H. Dailey, Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, page 66
2. A riddle, or a difficult problem.
   • Some enigma, some riddle: come, thy l'envoy, begin.1598, William Shakespeare, Loves Labour's Lost
3. Riddles and puzzles, collectively.
   • From the beginning, readers of The Enigma of Arrival are likely to feel surrounded by enigma and puzzle.2000, Harish Trivedi, Richard Allen, Literature and Nation, page 147
4. Mysteriousness; obscurity; a lack of clarity.
   • In those halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity .1995, Ian Ward ·, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives, page 203
5. A style of literature characterized by obscurity and hints of transcendental meaning.
   • But in a sense it is probably close to this book— a series of juxtaposed splinters of meaning, which perhaps once in ten million times will come out as a piece of interpretable prose, with the black pieces intervening, and possibly one could look at this as a one-in-ten million exercise in enigma...1971, Paul West, Caliban's filibuster, page 233
6. A protein with three LIM domains (a conserved cysteine- and histidine-rich structure of two adjacent zinc fingers) at the C terminus that regulates protein phosphorylation.
   • Members of this LIM protein family expressed in muscle include muscle LIM protein (MLP), enigma, actinin-associated LIM protein (ALP), cypher, four and a half LIM-only protein FHL/SLIM, and heart LIM protein (HLP).2007, Matti Weckström, Pasi Tavi, Cardiac Mechanotransduction, page 84

See all 10 meanings of enigma