The third "-gry" word, revisited

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Column on the odd case that there’s someone not familiar with it. And, no, there’s still no common “third word.” Anyway. . . some stuff I found in 1970s newspaper archives, still with no published reference predating 1975.

Frome one newspaper, the question was supposedly asked. . . and answered. . . on a recent Mike Douglas Show:

A phone call to Douglas production headquarters in Philadelphia and one to their latest production site in norther California only resulted in driving the show’s producer up the wall since no on on the staff can remember the answer. If there is one, it’s an obscure one, either archaic or polysyllabic, or one big fat pun." --Buffalo Evening News, Oct. 30, 1975 (Maybe the tapes had been taped over by that time, so they couldn’t replay. They did stuff like that back in the day.)

Then, just a few days later two people answered the riddle, such as it was. One was Norm Holland of State University of Buffalo and 12-year-old Nadine Dulkiewicz of East Seneca High School, Buffalo NY, who both offered “aggry.” Maybe they had seen the Mike Douglas show, since they both gave the same answer? This was only about six months when the riddle first started appearing. --Buffalo Evening News, Nov. 4, 1975.

And, FWIW, the writer’s last option for the answer “one big fat pun” is the version accepted in the SD column, which Cecil answers as “three.” Marilyn vos Savant accepted the pun version, too, although the reader who sent it in said that the correct phrasing was “‘g’ or ‘y’,” and in the verbiage of the riddle, the only other word that ended in ‘g’ or ‘y’ was “say.” --Parade Magazine, March 9, 1997.

Both of these pun versions seem a little far fetched, JMO.

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From 2018

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If you are speaking the question, the third word can be “pedigree,” unless you specify how the word must be spelled.

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You don’t even need to fish that deep: agree is the obvious one; then disagree. Then degree. If we’re trawling deeper waters, filigree. I believe the question is always spoken as “ending in G-R-Y.”

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For a word that both begins and ends in “gry” (phonetically) there’s “gris-gris”.

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I thought the canonical answer was to slice off the hand of the person asking the “riddle”.

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Last comment on this, although it could be inferred in the OP. I just didn’t spell it out.

I suspect that the answer offered on “Mike Douglas” was “aggry” for the reasons given in the OP since just a few days after the original article, two people came up with it, and since it was a pretty obscure word, that’s why none of the production staff could remember it.

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I thought you were talking about the belay device in climbing! But apparently that’s spelled grigri.

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I think it was a stupid trick question in the spirit of the stupid trick questions you get on Facebook Reels and the such. Follows the same sort of formula.

What’s the first word in the dictionary? The. (“The dictionary.”)

What has four letters, sometimes has nine letters, and never has fine. (Not a riddle, just a statement of fact. Read as :“Four,” “sometimes,” “never.”

What word is spelled incorrectly in every dictionary? Incorrectly.

What word is always pronounced wrong? Wrong.

There was another one I literally came across today that had the same type of answer that I’ve forgotten. It’s practically its own subgenre of gotcha question, so I don’t think it’s far-fetched to assume it was a pun.

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The fifth panel also applies to many “math puzzles” you find online.

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What’s the only word that’s an anagram of itself?

Stifle.

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You mean “five”? Otherwise that’s an extremely confusing riddle.

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Fat fingers + phone + autocorrect = “fine,” apparently. Yes, “five.”

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FWIW, I stumped my wife with your example.

(She was unamused.)

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Small advance, but (FWIW) this “puzzle” was known in Atlanta by September, 1974, so we’ve got a pre-1975 sighting.

THIRD ‘GRY’? The city desk gets many calls for information please. Night city editor Jim Bentley relayed this one.

Someone on the phone wanted to know if the city side could name the third word in the English language that ends in “gry.” He cited “hungry” and “angry” as the other two.

The night city desk did not have the answer. Nor do I, not yet. Do you? The phone is 428-5150.

[In Leo Aikman’s “He Now Faces the Music,” The Atlanta Constitution, 4 September 1974, p. 5-A.]

GETTING ANGRY: If that fellow who called night city editor Jim Bentley asking the third word in the language ending “gry” was pulling our leg, if there is no such word, some of us are going to join the “12 angry men.” We are hungry for the answer. A few have called saying the challenge has them “climbing the wall.”

[In Leo Aikman’s “No Longer Even a Smile,” The Atlanta Constitution, 11 September 1974, p. 5-A. Aikman referred to the puzzle again in his 20 September column and reported on a reader’s suggestion of another “gry” word.]

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Sorry, here’s the “answer” given in that 20 September 1974 column.

“GRY” AGAIN: Speaking of hungry, Mildred James, of Marietta, called to say of words ending in “gry” there is a three-letter word “gry” in the language, in Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary and Webster’s Unabridged. She said it means a unit indicating something small, as a tenth of a line.

I looked in the Unabridged and you something, she’s right.

[In Leo Aikman’s, “Scrooge Won’t Like This,” The Atlanta Constitution, 20 September 1974, p. 5-A.]

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Well, cool, a slightly earlier sighting.

I think Paul Dickson in his 1983 book “Words” mentions the -gry riddle, that the editors at Merriam-Webster were puzzled by the repeated requests for the third word.

And in a strange coincidence, in that same book, the three-letter word ‘gry’ appears in one of his word lists, unrelated to the riddle.

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I should have some filets for dinner. If doing so won’t cause too many flites.