This riddle has been around forever. (But then, so have I.)

My sixth grade teacher presented it to my class as:

“There are three words in English that end in ‘gree.’ The first two are ‘angry’ and ‘hungry,’ and if you’ve listened closely you’ll agree that I’ve told you the third one.”

(She didn’t tell us the answer. We had to think and look through dictionaries and encyclopedias, and ask our parents and finally come back the next day and admit we couldn’t figure it out.)

The answer is ‘agree.’

It is a phonetic version of the riddle, asking for words that end in the sound ‘gree,’ but tricks people into thinking about the letters g-r-y by giving the two examples.

There are other solutions and theories, but that is the one I remember.

By the way – according to www.snopes.com , this has become one of the most emailed riddles.

In common English, there are actually only two words that end in “gry”: hungry and angry. This has not always been the case; there are a number of archaic and obsolete English “-gry” words, including aggry, variegated glass beads of ancient manufacture; puggry, (a light scarf wound around a hat or helmet to protect the head from the sun; and, of course, gry, a unit of measure equal to one tenth of a line. As one is unlikely, however, to see these terms anywhere but in an unabridged dictionary, they aren’t too helpful.

The source of the common conviction that there is a third common “-gry” word in English comes from the following brainteaser:

Think of words ending in -gry. 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 everybody uses everyday. If you have listened carefully, I’ve already told you what it is.

So asked, the question becomes a trick: “There are only three words in ‘the English Language,’” it asks. “What is the third word?”

The third word in “the English Language” is, of course “Language”. Ugh.

Needless to say, when the brainteaser isn’t repeated verbatim (as it hardly ever is), the meaning changes entirely—hence the widespread belief that angry and hungry have a mysterious third partner.

There are three words in “the English language”. Thus, the answer is “language”.

sorry, Copperdragonette, but “degree” also ends in -gree.

hungry

gry – gry itself is a word.

gotta go!