answer this riddle please

Hi Jo, welcome to the forum.

'Three'. The question never asks for the third word ending in 'gry'. "I've given you the third word. What is' it'. The third word of the statement is 'three'.

However, there are actually 5 words that end in the letters "gry" they are as follows:

puggry
mawgry
aggry
hungry
angry

the are three words in 'the english language'....the third word is 'language'

There are NOT three words in the English language that end with "gry". At least not three COMMON words. The "answer" to this question lies in knowing the question in its ORIGINAL form. That orginal form was something like this:

"Angry and "hungry" are two common words in the English language that end with "gry". What is the third word?

Note that, in this form of the question, it is never stated that there ARE three common English words that end with "gry", just that "angry" and "hungry" are TWO that do. And in the second sentence, the one that actually asks the question, it does not specifically limit the answer to words that end with "gry" - it just asks what the third word is. The reader of the question ASSUMES that "the third word" refers to the third word that ends with "gry", making the simultaneous assumption that there are, in fact, three such words. This is natural because why else would anybody put these two sentences together?! Why? To confuse everyone! Once you accept the notion that the two sentences are not in any way related to each other, it is clear that nowhere is it stated there are, in fact, three common English words that end with "gry". Which is good, because there aren't! There are hundreds of words that would qualify if you drop the "common" restriction. But there simply are no COMMON words, other than "angry" and "hungry" that end with "gry".

So, what is "the third word"? The third word of WHAT? The Holy Bible? The Constitution? Webster's dictionary? War and Peace? It doesn't say. So you have to make some kind of assumption. With no reference to what set of words is being asked about, the only logical assumption is that the author's intended set of words was those that appear in the sentence itself, since that is the only thing that is supplied as a reference. Therefore, the question becomes "What is the third word in this sentence?" And the answer is, "the".

For obvious reasons, already stated, most who read this question assume that there actually are three common words that end with "gry". And so, when they are stumped by this conundrum, and ask someone else for help, they include this assumption in their re-wording of the question. So the question very quickly departed from its original form (a "trick" question) into something that was completely unanswerable because it begins with a false premise. Many people, however, still believe the altered question to be merely a trick question, and not an unanswerable one. That's the only reason the question is still making the rounds.