vax1:ipspec (09/03/82)
The following problem has stumped the best(?) minds in our area, so we are submitting it to the net in the hope that somewhere out there someone will know the answer. PROBLEM: In the English language, there are five words that end in the letters -gry. Two of the five are obvious, angry and hungry. What are the other three? We've been told (by a reliable source), that one of the remaining three is a fairly common word. Please submit the answers to the net so we can sleep again at night. Thanks and happy searching.
bsg (09/07/82)
The definitive answer on "-gry" words is quoted below. My friends and I also broke our heads on this one a few years ago; I only recently found the truth. >From (a delightful book called) A Connoisseur's Collection of Old and New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful and Outlandish Words, by Paul Dickson, Delacorte Press, 1982. (Hardback, $13.95) "Hungry. Aside from angry, the ONLY [emphasis mine] 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 obselete word for hungry that is allowed to stay in the dictionary because it shows up in Shakespeare. Editors at Merriam have found a few others buried deep within the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], 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." pp. 194-195 I hope you can sleep now. Billie Goldstein ...!npois!bsg Bell Labs Neptune | | | |_|_| | |
ech (09/07/82)
#R:vax1:-18500:whuxlb:9900001:000:78 whuxlb!ech Sep 7 10:27:00 1982 You forgot Sleepgry, Grumpgry, Sneezegry, Happgry and Dopegry. =Ned Horvath=
bentson@sri-unix (09/18/82)
I've been stumped by this one.... Name three words ending in "gry". The problem is that everyone I've asked can quickly identify "hungry" and "angry", but no one is able to get the third. I only hope that there is such a word. Perhaps somebody with a large dictionary can "grep" the answer. My word list is no help. My apologies if such a question is bad form. Randy Bentson Colo State U - Comp Sci ucbvax!hplabs!csu-cs!bentson