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This article focuses on the linguistic-rhetorical phenomenon massively present in medieval Arabic poetry, which consists in obliterating a noun to replace it with an epithet. After analysing such a theoretical discourse of the medieval tradition, dealing with this process called ṣifa li-mawṣūf maḥḏūf , the article examines the links that it has with what this same tradition calls abyāt al-maʿānī , those abstruse verses that cannot be understood immediately and require interpretation. Then, with a view to apprehending the specificity of this phenomenon of the obliteration of the noun and accounting for the privilege conferred on it by its remarkable recurrence in poetic discourse, the article attempts to situate it in the more general framework of the ilġāz. To this end, it interrogates some ḫabar s reported by Abū l-Faraǧ al-Iṣfahānī in the Kitāb al-Aġānī (The Book of Songs), which testify to the fact that the obliteration of the noun constitutes a decisive factor among those that allow a line of poetry to be used as a riddle or puzzle, in a kind of game or test in which it is submitted to the knowledge and sagacity of one or more people, in order to test their competence in poetry. The hypothesis guiding this work is the following: the remarkable frequency of the obliteration of the mawṣūf in the medieval Arabic would testify that poetry is conceived as a discourse in which the speaker avoids naming, and avoids mentioning the name of what he is talking about, in order to entrust the mention of it to the addressee (listener or reader). Such is the essentially sibylline dimension of poetic speech. Without always or even often presenting itself as an enigma, this speech is nevertheless structured as an enigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]