Re: Irritating word puzzle.

From: http://www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/FARQ/gryFARQ.html

Words that end in -gry

For reasons that we can't determine, the "-gry question" is turning
up again and again from our patrons. The best and most comprehensive
answer to it comes from the Stumpers discussion list for reference
librarians, and we quote from it below.

Here is the question in its correct "puzzle" form. "Think of words
ending in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three
words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is
something that everybody uses everyday. If you have listened carefully
, I've already told you what it is."

The secret here is that the real question is "There are only three
words in the English language. What is the third word?" That is, there
are only three words in the phrase "the English language". The third
word is "language", which is indeed something we use every day. The
first two words are "the" and "English".

Having found the answer to the actual riddle, however, you may still
wonder if there are any other English words ending in -gry. There are.
The intrepid reference librarians of Stumpers found the following
answers to the question:

For a very long list of -gry words, including places and other proper
names, see the Solution to the /language/english/spelling/gry problem
in the rec.puzzles Usenet group's Language Puzzles Archive.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, five words in the English
language end in -gry. In addition to the common angry and hungry:
aggry, a glass bead found buried in the earth in Ghana.
puggry, a light scarf wound around a hat or helmet to protect the
head from the sun, and meagry, of meager appearance.

( --Ann Landers column, in response to question what word besides
angry and hungry ends in -gry. Daily Breeze (Torrance CA) 1/31/89;
also in Los Angeles Times1/31/89 p. V8.)

William Safire in What's the Good Word (1982) says the question is a
hoax, intended to waste the questionee's time. He quotes David
Guralnik, editor of Simon & Schuster's Webster's New World Dictionary
as saying there are no other "native English words" so ending, except
angry and hungry. Guralnik notes three imported words:

puggry -- an Indian turban; a scarf worn around a sun helmet.
mawgry -- from Old French: being regarded with displeasure.
aggry -- colored glass beads worn by Africans.

RQ, spring 1976, with 12 responses to a fall 1975 question, listed
aggry ("describes a certain type of variegated glass bead found buried
in the earth in Ghana and in England"), citing Webster's Third and
OED, puggry, a variant spelling of puggree ("a light scarf wound
around a hat or helmet to protect the head from the sun"), citing OED,
Webster's 2d, and Funk and Wagnall's Crossword Puzzle Word Finder.
The same article also listed gry itself (obsolete, "the grunt of a
pig, the dirt under the nail; hence the veriest trifle," further
explained as "the smallest unit in Locke's proposed decimal system of
linear measurement, being the tenth of a line, the hundredth of an
inch, and the thousandth of a ['philosophical'] foot."), citing OED,
also in Walker's Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language and Funk
and Wagnall's New Standard Dictionary.

More about -gry ... if you care

Hungry. Aside from angry, the only other common English word that
ends in -gry. For reasons unclear, the commonest query that is
addressed to the editors at the G.C. Merriam Company goes like this:
"There are three English words that end in -gry. Hungry and angry are
two of them, what is the third?" Among the 450,000 entries in
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, there is only one other,
which is anhungry, an obsolete word for hungry that is allowed to stay
in the dictionary because it shows up in Shakespeare. (Coriolanus.
I:i:209.) Editors at Merriam have found a few others buried deep
within the OED, usually as variant spellings. One is puggry, one of
several spellings of pugaree (also pugree, puggree, puggaree), which
is a scarf wound around a sun helmet.

-- Dickson, Paul. Words. New York: Delacorte Pr., 1982. p. 194-195.


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             edheil@postmark.net
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Padraic Brown wrote:

> My mother is the recipient of the old "There are three words in the
> Enlgish language that end in "gry", one is angry one is hungry..."
> word puzzle.  As far as I'm concerned the third word is gry (means
> rage or roar), but that's because I'm not too imaginative when it
> comes to word puzzles.  Does any one of us know what the "right"
> answer is?  She and a couple of friends have been trying to sort it
> out for a week or so, but I'd like to put the thing out of its misery.
>
> Gryingly yours,
> Padraic.
>