Words Ending in “-gry”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Martha.

Yes, who’s this?

This is Johnny Palmer out of Cleburne, Texas.

Welcome, Johnny. What’s going on?

Not too much. I have a 30-year-old question I’ve been trying to answer, and I was hoping you all can help me with it.

Wow, how old are you?

30 years.

Well, 45 now.

Okay.

It was in about fifth grade, my teacher, I guess she wanted us to have a project to keep us busy, to keep quiet or something, but she said there was three words in the English language that ended in the letters G-R-Y, and she even gave us two of them, hungry and angry, and didn’t give us the third.

So I ran to the library and found the thickest dictionary I could find and started from the letter A, and I got a guess about halfway through the B’s before I figured that wasn’t a great idea.

Oh, bless your heart.

Yeah, well, it was a chore.

But then I kind of gave up.

But then a couple years later, or like when I was a teenager or whatever, somebody said it was a word.

I think it was Puggery, maybe P-U-G-R-Y.

But when I looked that one up, I came up with a G-R-E-E as an ending, and I figured there might have been an alternative way of spelling it or something like that.

But I wasn’t sure if that was the right answer, and that’s about as close as I’ve ever gotten.

I hope you all can help me out today.

Now listen, Johnny, there’s a couple layers to this, all right?

Okay.

The first one is to understand that the question your teacher asked you was a trick.

Oh, okay.

All right, that’s the first thing.

The second thing to understand is that there are more than 100 words that end in G-R-Y, but the thing is none of them are common.

They’re all from other languages or archaic and long since not used.

And we’ll link to various lists of these words on the Internet and show you.

So right away we’re seeing there is an answer.

There are plenty of words that end in G-R-Y that aren’t angry and hungry.

This is how the question should be phrased.

Think of words ending in G-R-Y.

Angry and hungry are two of them.

There are only three words in the English language.

What is the third word?

The word is something that everyone uses every day.

If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.

Now, all of that wording, Johnny, and everything that I said there is precise because it’s a trick, all right?

And here’s the trick.

The trick is I made it seem like everything in that whole paragraph was connected.

But really what I’ve done is given you two completely useless bits of information.

The first two lines, think of words ending in G-R-Y, angry and hungry are two of them.

Those two sentences go together, and they have nothing to do with the rest of the questions.

Nothing.

And so the only key part here that you need to pay attention to is there are only three words in the English language.

What is the third word?

And so in the English, I mean, sorry, the English language is, according to the way this trick is phrased, is treated as a phrase.

So there are only three words in the English language.

And so then the third word is language.

Oh, okay.

I got you.

I got to go hunt her down now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hardy, har, har.

But you know, Johnny, here’s the thing.

This question is asked all the time, and people get the question wrong, which means there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of people running around this earth going, I don’t know. I can’t figure this out.

I don’t have to go out and buy a medical dictionary or anything right now.

No, and it’s crazy because it’s like when a child tries to tell a joke, and they kind of get the punchline all messed up, and there’s no joke left because they ruin it.

And so people have kind of remembered the gist that there’s supposedly a third word that ends in G-R-Y.

Right, right.

Well, I’ll tell you what.

We’ll post the exact wording of how it’s supposed to go online, and you can decide whether or not you want to give them that one or the messed up one.

Okay, well, I’m going to keep listening.

I’ve got a bunch of other questions for you also.

All right, well, that’s super.

Thank you so much.

Okay, sounds good.

Take care of yourself.

All right, thanks a lot, guys.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye, Johnny.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

That said, if you’ve got a word puzzle for us or something that’s been bugging you for 30 years, let us help you out of your misery.

We’ve got a pill right here that’ll take care of everything.

This is natural cognitive enhancement here on A Way with Words.

If you’ve got a question or comment about something we’ve discussed on the program, by all means, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call at 1-877-929-9673.