| Subject: Re: 3 words ending with "gry" |
Author:
tarryn
|
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Date Posted: 07:56:09 03/08/03 Sat
In reply to:
DJ
's message, "Re: 3 words ending with "gry"" on 14:49:22 03/05/03 Wed
>There isn't one!
>
>This `riddle' has been circulating in email for years
>now, in various forms of words, and had appeared in
>print media before that. Dictionary and reference
>departments the world over have been plagued by
>questions about it. It seems to have originated as a
>trick question, but the wording has become so garbled
>in subsequent transmission that it is hard to tell
>what was originally intended. The most probable answer
>is that, in the original wording, the question was
>phrased something like this:
>
>Think of words ending in -gry. `Angry' and `hungry'
>are two of them. What is the third word in the English
>language? You use it every day, and if you were
>listening carefully, I've just told you what it is.
>The answer, of course, is `language' (the third word
>in `the English language').
>
>There are several other English words ending in -gry
>which are listed in the complete Oxford English
>Dictionary, but none of them could be described as
>common. They include the trivial oddities un-angry and
>a-hungry, and
>
>aggry: aggry beads, according to various 19th-century
>writers, are coloured glass beads found buried in the
>ground in parts of Africa.
>begry: a 15th-century spelling of beggary.
>conyngry: a 17th-century spelling of the obsolete word
>conynger, meaning `rabbit warren', which survives in
>old English field names such as `Conery' and
>`Coneygar'.
>gry: the name for a hundredth of an inch in a
>long-forgotten decimal system of measurement devised
>by the philosopher John Locke (and presumably
>pronounced to rhyme with `cry').
>higry-pigry: an 18th-century rendition of the drug
>hiera picra.
>iggry: an old army slang word meaning `hurry up',
>borrowed from Arabic.
>meagry: a rare obsolete word meaning `meagre-looking'.
>menagry: an 18th-century spelling of menagerie.
>nangry: a rare 17th-century spelling of angry.
>podagry: a 17th-century spelling of podagra, a medical
>term for gout.
>puggry: a 19th-century spelling of the Hindi word
>pagri (in English usually puggaree or puggree),
>referring either to a turban or to a piece of cloth
>worn around a sun-helmet.
>skugry: 16th-century spelling of the dialect word
>scuggery meaning `secrecy' (the faint echo of
>`skulduggery' is quite accidental!).
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