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
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