From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!bsg Newsgroups: net.trivia Title: Re: Word quiz Article-I.D.: npois.1587 Posted: Tue Sep 7 10:09:38 1982 Received: Wed Sep 8 04:34:41 1982 References: vax1.185 The definitive answer on "-gry" words is quoted below. My friends and I also broke our heads on this one a few years ago; I only recently found the truth. >From (a delightful book called) A Connoisseur's Collection of Old and New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful and Outlandish Words, by Paul Dickson, Delacorte Press, 1982. (Hardback, $13.95) "Hungry. Aside from angry, the ONLY [emphasis mine] other common English word that ends in -gry. For reasons unclear, the commonest query that is addressed to the editors at the G. & C. Merriam Company goes like this: 'There are three English words that end in -gry. Hungry and angry are two of them, what is the third?' Among the 450,000 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, there is only one other, which is anhungry, an obselete word for hungry that is allowed to stay in the dictionary because it shows up in Shakespeare. Editors at Merriam have found a few others buried deep within the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], usually as variant spellings. One is puggry, one of several spellings of pugaree (also pugree, puggree, puggaree), which is a scarf wound around a sun helmet." pp. 194-195 I hope you can sleep now. Billie Goldstein ...!npois!bsg Bell Labs Neptune | | | |_|_| | |