I found this on the Internet Public Library
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<h1>Words that end in -gry</h1>
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:
[ul][li]aggry, a glass bead found buried in the earth in Ghana.[/li][li]puggry, a light scarf wound around a hat or helmet to protect the[/li]head from the sun, and
[li]meagry, of meager appearance.[/ul][/li]
( --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:
[ul][li]puggry – an Indian turban; a scarf worn around a sun helmet.[/li][li]mawgry – from Old French: being regarded with displeasure.[/li][li]aggry – colored glass beads worn by Africans.[/ul][/li]
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.
<address>the Internet Public Library - = - http://www.ipl.org/ - = - ipl@ipl.org</address>
Last updated Jun 24, 1998
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Brian O’Neill
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