text: It turns out there isn't a third word that ends in "gry", at least not a common one. Augery, the practice of divination by inspecting the innards of sacrificial animals (usually chickens), is sometimes spelled “Augry”, but it is far from common. \n\nThe “gry” question comes from a riddle that has been distorted. As a preface, here is a much more common riddle:\n\n“Railroad crossing, watch out for the cars. How can you spell it without any R’s?”\n\nIf you write the railroad crossing riddle with correct punctuation, as opposed to saying it aloud, the second sentence is:\n\n“How can you spell ‘it’ without any R’s?”\n\nAnd the answer is obvious – “I-T”. The first sentence just diverts your attention. A minor variation asks you to spell “that” without any R’s.\n\nHowever, if someone overheard the railroad crossing riddle on the playground, didn’t hear the answer, came home and asked “Dad, how can you spell ‘railroad crossing’ without using the letter ‘R’?”, the riddle would be so distorted that it would be impossible to answer.\n\nBack to the three words that end in “gry”. It started out as a riddle, with the same structure as the railroad crossing riddle. The original form is:\n\n"Angry and hungry are two words that end in ‘gry’. There are three words in the English language. What is the third word? Everyone knows what it means and everyone uses it every day. Look closely and I have already given you the third word. What is it?"\n\nNote the structure; the first sentence diverts your attention and has nothing to do with the question. The last three divert your attention too. The second and third sentences, with proper punctuation, are:\n\n“There are three words in ‘the English Language’. What is the third word?”\n\nThe answer to the riddle is “Language”.\n\nI hope you can see the double exterior quotation marks and the single interior ones in this font, by the way. Punctuation is important. Back to the riddle – for some reason it is quite popular in its distorted form: \n\n“There are three common words in the English language that end in ‘gry’; ‘hungry’ and ‘angry’ are the first two. What is the third?” In that form, the question is impossible to answer, just as you cannot spell “Railroad Crossing” without using the letter “R”. (Yes, you can say \n“A-I-L-O-A-D   C-O-S-S-I-N-G”, \nbut that isn’t spelling it properly.)