OK... here's a riddle for you guys...
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From: Bloomington
OK... here's a riddle for you guys...
Everyone think of words ending the -gry. ANGRY and HUNGRY are two of them, and there are only three words in the English dictionary. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses almost every day.
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From: Zionsville
Actually, many words end in -gry, including gry itself, although all but angry and hungry are rare, foreign, obscure or obsolete.The most common "answers" are aggry, a burial bead from Ghana, puggry, a scarf worn around the neck in India to protect the head from the sun, and anhungry, an obsolete form of hungry that was used once in one of Shakespeare's less-popular plays (Coriolanus, Act I, Scene I, line 209); this association with the Bard is enough to earn it a place in Merriam-Webster's Third New International (unabridged) Dictionary of the English Language.
"But that can't be the answer," you groan. No. It's not. There is no answer.
The puzzle is WRONG. "It's a fraud, it's a fake," says Will Shortz, who is the puzzle editor of the New York Times and the host of a puzzle segment on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (NPR, 11/10/96). The actual truth is that
NO other common English word ends in -gry! It's a trick question -- and the trick, at least in some versions, has been lost. Word-puzzle fans and reference librarians have been trying for years to track the question's history to find the original answer. But to do that we need to know what the original question was. And there are several different versions in circulation purporting to be the original.
"But that can't be the answer," you groan. No. It's not. There is no answer.
The puzzle is WRONG. "It's a fraud, it's a fake," says Will Shortz, who is the puzzle editor of the New York Times and the host of a puzzle segment on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (NPR, 11/10/96). The actual truth is that
NO other common English word ends in -gry! It's a trick question -- and the trick, at least in some versions, has been lost. Word-puzzle fans and reference librarians have been trying for years to track the question's history to find the original answer. But to do that we need to know what the original question was. And there are several different versions in circulation purporting to be the original.
