This Riddle Is Giving Me An Anuresym

[Flyspeck23]

No such word at all. There USED to be two words spelled "gry", but they are both centuries obsolete. The older "gry" meant "To rage, roar." and has not been used in 450 years or so. The newer "gry" was a small fraction of an inch in an idiosyncratic measurement system proposed by John Locke but never adopted by anyone.

Therefore, the correct answer to the riddle is: "Shut your gob, you festering tit! There are only two such words in English." There USED to be two other such words, but they are both now utterly obsolete, having passed out of the English language.

See my reply to Hand of Evil above for a list of 100 words ending with "gry", and two sites explaining the riddle.
Nice try, though

 

[Thanee]

Guess you have your answer already, but havn't looked at the replies yet.

From what I'm told, this riddle has an actual answer (in other words, it's not one of those trick riddles).

Yeah, it has one, altho it's still a trick riddle.

Three men look for a place to stay. They find a hotel, and the manager there is willing to let them all have one room for $10 each. The three men give him $10 each for an altogether $30.

After a while, the manager started to feel guilty so he called the bell boy. He gives the bell boy $5 and tells him to go give it back to the three men. The bell boy, not having any change, decides to set aside $2 of the $5 and give the three men a $1 each.

From this, it reduces the cost of the room from $10 each to $9 each. From that conclusion, they paid $27 altogether (because we all know 9 x 3 = 27). But with the $2 that the bell boy kept, that only makes a $29 total.

What happened to the extra dollar?

I know I'm overlooking some little detail. Argh.

Easy. The $2 have to be subtracted from the $27 not added to it (and the $5 then added to get the initial $30).

Men pay $30 to manager.
Manager gives $5 to bell boy.
Bell boy gives $3 to men, but keeps $2 (these still have been paid by the men!).

So, the three men have paid $27 ($30 - $3).
The manager has received $25 ($20 - $5).
The bell boy has the missing $2 ($27 - $25).

That's it, just a trick riddle, since it deceives the reader to think, the $2 should be added to the $27 not subtracted from it.



Bye
Thanee

 

[maddman75]

http://www.word-detective.com/gry.html

http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/gry.htm

http://rec-puzzles.org/sol.pl/language/english/spelling/gry

Thanks. I've been wondering about the solution to that riddle for about fifteen years.