Word.ws English Dictionary

Tower of Hanoi

Tower of Hanoi proper noun: a mathematical puzzle or game which consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes that can slide onto any rod. The aim is to transfer a stack of disks, one move at a time, to a different rod, while never allowing a larger disk to be on top of a small one.

tower of hanoi: a mathematical puzzle or game which consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different...
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Tower of Hanoi

  1. A mathematical puzzle or game which consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes that can slide onto any rod. The aim is to transfer a stack of disks, one move at a time, to a different rod, while never allowing a larger disk to be on top of a small one.
    • Senkovi felt as though he was […] playing some odd Tower of Hanoi game where to progress he was constantly moving pieces backwards.2019, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin, Macmillan, page 153

Questions about Tower of Hanoi

What does Tower of Hanoi mean?
Tower of Hanoi means a mathematical puzzle or game which consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes that can slide onto any rod. The aim is to transfer a stack of disks, one move at a time, to a different rod, while never allowing a larger disk to be on top of a small one.
What part of speech is Tower of Hanoi?
Tower of Hanoi is a proper noun.

Words near Tower of Hanoi in the dictionary

  1. tower ladders
  2. Tower musket
  3. Tower muskets
  4. tower mustard
  5. Tower of Babel
  6. Tower of Hanoi
  7. Tower of Hanoy
  8. Tower of London
  9. Tower of London test
  10. Tower of Pisa
  11. tower of silence

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Tower of Hanoi (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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