Colleen from Fairbanks, Alaska, is pondering the word hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry, and applied to someone who’s irritable as the result of hunger. Although hangry has been around sincet at least the 1950s, it enjoyed a boost in popularity in the 1990s. In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for this useful adjective. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hangry Meaning and Origin”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Colleen Herning in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Hey, Colleen, welcome.
Welcome to the show. What’s up?
Oh, I just wanted to know what the source of the word hangry is.
A while back I was talking about how I was feeling really hungry and how irritable I get, and one of my friends said, oh, well, you’re hangry.
And I hadn’t heard that word before.
Huh. Can you guess where it comes from?
I can guess that it’s a combination of hungry and angry.
Yeah, of course, yeah.
Yeah, you don’t sound hangry right now.
No, I just had a really good bowl full of bananas, yogurt, and cottage cheese. So I’m very patient right now.
That’ll keep you going.
There should be another word like that after you’ve had something like that and you’re really happy.
Exactly.
Well, Colleen, hangry dates back to at least the 1950s, which surprises a lot of people because it really had a resurgence in the 1990s.
You kind of see it coming around in the late 90s as a meme or a word that kept getting submitted and resubmitted to dictionaries and would show up in new word votes and that sort of thing.
In the last few years, Snickers started, the candy bar people started a television commercial campaign where they used the idea and the word of hangry to suggest that if you’re irritable because you’re hungry, then the Snickers is the answer.
And that’s it for you to decide.
I think your breakfast sounds better to me.
And so now we have this word that is in many dictionaries.
And in January of 2018, recently, the Oxford English Dictionary finally included an entry for hangry.
Oh, that’s so cool.
That’s like the crowning of a word.
That’s like the ensconcement of a word.
Yeah, when you make it into that dictionary, you know you’ve made it.
Yeah, yeah.
So there you go, Colin.
Cool.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
Yeah, you too.
Thanks for calling.
Really appreciate it.
Okie doke.
Bye.
Yeah, you don’t want to have an argument with someone when you’re hangry.
No.
You don’t want to do something really important when you’re hangry.
No, no.
You want to be, what’s the word for if you’re happy because you’re full?
Happy? Full? Flappy? I don’t know.
Why don’t we have a word for that?
Well, I know the feeling that when I have what’s called a burrito baby.
You eat a giant burrito and it’s like you’re pregnant.
You’re just like big round belly from a full burrito.
Yeah.
I guess you’re sufficiently Safansified.
Yeah, there we go.
Look that one up on our website.
You’ll come up with some cool calls that we’ve taken about it.
And call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.
The address is words@waywordradio.org.
I remember coming up with the word “hangry” when I was working nightshift in a factory in ’92. Of course we didn’t have the internet at that time so I didn’t know if it had been used previously but I hadn’t heard or seen it before. It was funny to me when I heard it nearly 20 years later. Too bad I didn’t trademark it back then.