Coined by professional puzzle-writer Francis Heaney, editor of GAMES Magazine and former editor of Enigma (the publication of the National Puzzlers' League), on 12 December 2003 on his now-defunct personal website Heanyland!, igry is a word coined to solve the puzzle of the third word in the English language ending in "gry", after "angry" and "hungry."
Together, we can change the dictionary
We in the puzzle world -- especially those of us who have ever spent more than 5 minutes reading the rec.puzzles newsgroup -- loathe the "gry" puzzle. So a bunch of us (John Chaneski, Peter Gordon, Kevin West, and myself, if I recall correctly) decided that we should make up a word, so that if anyone ever asked us the goddamn -gry riddle, we could just shrug and say, "Oh, don't you know? It's the word we made up. I thought everybody knew that."
We did feel that whatever word we invented should be a useful one, so we tried to come up with a concept that didn't really have an adequate word to describe it. Our word: igry, adj. (That's pronounced with a short "i".)
"Igry" basically means "painfully embarrassed for or uncomfortable about someone else's incredibly poor social behavior, or descriptive of such poor social behavior". Like, say you're at a restaurant, and one of the people at your table summons the waiter by snapping their fingers. Watching this makes you die a little inside. You feel igry. (Or you might think, "What an igry thing to do.") The noun form is "igriness".
Anyway, I have found this to be a darn useful word. It comes up a surprising amount. (Sample comment from my wife: "Oh, I just can't watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, it makes me feel too igry.") It's enriched my clique's vocabulary and now it can start enriching yours. Use it with abandon -- especially in print -- and maybe we can get it in the dictionary in our lifetime. Go, "igry"!
Some disputation has arisen around the nuances of igry, such as whether it solely accounts for uses in which the described behaviour is indicative of a moral failing, or if it can also be used to describe awkward and cringe-inducing misunderstandings. Software developer Doug Orleans commented on LiveJournal in January 2004 that "Eggcorns make me igry," and Mark Liberman supports this usage in his Language Log, arguing that it is reasonable to extend the meaning of igry "to cover the embarrassed sympathy we feel for the linguistic cluelessness behind a malapropism." Heaney himself later weighs in:
The "eggcorns make me igry" usage doesn't seem wrong to me. I mean, when I see someone I respect writing about "reigning in one's impulses" or something, it does make me feel embarrassed for them, and it definitely generates a little of that dying-inside feeling that is the core of igriness. Limiting my definition to merely reactions to poor behavior might be too narrow. Like, here's another f'rinstance: watching the trailer to the new Ben Stiller movie makes me igry, not because the subject matter of the movie seems offensive, but because it just pains me so much that Ben Stiller keeps taking such embarrassing roles in crappy movies. So that doesn't really fall under the "bad behavior" umbrella either. I welcome further refinements to the definition.
Igry has had its use cases prevailingly claimed since the late 2010s by "cringe" or "cringey" as the catch-all for both senses of igry. Similarly, the concept of "Karen" (referring to the aggressively entitled behaviour attributed to middle-aged white women at restaurants and retail businesses) dates either to the film Mean Girls in 2004, or to a 2005 Dane Cook comedy special, before it gained popularity throughout the Black Twitter community and Reddit, circa 2017.
Igry is not to be confused with the identically-pronounced iggry or iggri, cited in the OED and in a Word Ways review of Dickson's Word Treasury as dating to World War II, used in British military slang to mean "hurry up," supposedly resembling an Egyptian Arabic word meaning the same.
Iron Noder 2021, 3/30