text: Apart from 'angry' and 'hungry', what other common English word ends in '-gry'? Printer Friendly Version \n\n\nYou are told wrong! There isn't one!\n\nThis '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.\n\nThe most probable answer is that, in the original wording, the question was phrased something like this: \n\nThink 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.\nThe answer, of course, is 'language' (the third word in 'the English language').\n\nThere 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 \n\naggry: aggry beads, according to various 19th-century writers, are coloured glass beads found buried in the ground in parts of Africa. \nbegry: a 15th-century spelling of beggary. \nconyngry: a 17th-century spelling of the obsolete word conynger, meaning 'rabbit warren', which survives in old English field names such as 'Conery' and 'Coneygar'. \ngry: 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'). \nhigry-pigry: an 18th-century rendition of the drug hiera picra. \niggry: an old army slang word meaning 'hurry up', borrowed from Arabic. \nmeagry: a rare obsolete word meaning 'meagre-looking'. \nmenagry: an 18th-century spelling of menagerie. \nnangry: a rare 17th-century spelling of angry. \npodagry: a 17th-century spelling of podagra, a medical term for gout. \npuggry: 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. \nskugry: 16th-century spelling of the dialect word scuggery meaning 'secrecy' (the faint echo of 'skulduggery' is quite accidental!).