Three English words end in -gry. Two of them are angry and hungry. What is the third word?

Every year at about the same time, students would enter an AOL tutoring room with this question. My online tutoring colleagues and I suspected the puzzle was included in a textbook somewhere, and that teachers reached the same point at about the same time.

We did the best we could with this doozie. I was always afraid teachers might mark our answers wrong if they didn’t agree with whatever was in the teacher manual.

But the truth is that the answer depends on how the question is interpreted. Check it out:

• World Wide Words
• Snopes Urban Legends
• Wikipedia

I hope the textbook publishers will let this one rest now.

Posted Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:01:57 and filed under Language at Play, Playing with Words. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.