Hangry (pronounced hang-gree)
Feeling
irritable or irrationally angry because of hunger.
1915-1920:
A portmanteau word, the construct being from h(ungry) + angry. Hungry is from the Middle English hungry, from the Old English hungriġ & hungreġ (hungry; famishing; meager), from the Proto-Germanic hungragaz (hungry). It was cognate with the Dutch hongerig, the German hungrig and the Swedish hungrig, all of which meant “hungry”. Anger is from the Old Norse angr (affliction, sorrow).
Hungry (pre
950) was from the Middle English hungry
& hungri, from the Old English hungriġ & hungreġ (hungry; famishing; meager) which existed also in the Common
West Germanic and was from the Proto-Germanic hungragaz (hungry). It was
cognate with the German hungrig, the Old
Frisian hungerig, the Dutch hongerig, the German hungrig and the Swedish hungrig, all of which meant “hungry”. The use as a figurative form is noted from
circa 1200.
Angry
(1350-1400) in the sense of "hot-tempered, irascible; incensed, openly
wrathful" is a construct of the earlier noun anger + -y, The Old Norse adjective was ongrfullr (sorrowful) (the Old Norse angr meant “affliction, sorrow”), from
the mid thirteenth century a Middle English form was angerful (anxious, eager). The
“angry young man” dates from 1941 but became a popular form only after John
Osborne's (1929-1994) play Look Back in Anger was
performed in 1956 although the exact phrase does appears nowhere in the
text. The rare related form is angriness.
The –y suffix
is from the Middle English –y & -i, from the Old English -iġ (-y, -ic), from the Proto-Germanic -īgaz (-y, -ic), from the primitive Indo-European
-kos, -ikos, & -iḱos (-y, -ic).
It was cognate with the Scots -ie
(-y), the West Frisian -ich (-y), the
Dutch -ig (-y), the Low German -ig (-y), the German -ig (-y), the Swedish -ig (-y), the Latin -icus (-y, -ic) and the Ancient Greek -ικός (-ikós); a doublet of
-ic. The –y suffix was added to (1) nouns
and adjectives to form adjectives meaning “having the quality of” and (2) verbs
to form adjectives meaning "inclined to".
Etymologists list hangry as a humorous
invention in US English dating from circa 1915-1920 but use soon died out, not
to be revived until 1956 when it was mentioned in the US psychoanalytic journal
American Imago in a discussion about various
kinds of deliberate and accidental wordplay.
Hangry, unlike some of contractions or elisions documented, survived (or
was again revived) in the internet age, becoming popular from the mid-1990s and
achieved sufficient linguistic critical-mass for the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) to accept it as a word in their 2018 update. Even among those who dismiss hangry as slang,
the usual rules of English should apply so the comparative is more hangry, the superlative
most hangry, and the adjectives hangrier and hangriest.
Some dictionaries still resist, apparently not convinced it’s yet a proper word despite the usually authoritative imprimatur of the OED. For those who side with the OED, of note is that hangry thus becomes only the third word in English to end in –gry, the other two being, predictably, angry and hungry. There is the odd instance in the historic record of puggry (a light scarf wound around a hat or helmet to protect the head from the sun) but etymologists overwhelmingly say this is a mistake, a Raj-era corruption of the correct puggaree, from the Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi pagṛī (turban), related to the Punjabi pagg (turban) and Kashmiri pag (turban), all of unknown origin.
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