Home » Segments » Hangry Meaning and Origin

Hangry Meaning and Origin

Play episode

Colleen from Fairbanks, Alaska, is pondering the word hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry, and applied to someone who’s irritable as the result of hunger. Although hangry has been around sincet at least the 1950s, it enjoyed a boost in popularity in the 1990s. In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for this useful adjective. This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

1 comment
  • I remember coming up with the word “hangry” when I was working nightshift in a factory in ’92. Of course we didn’t have the internet at that time so I didn’t know if it had been used previously but I hadn’t heard or seen it before. It was funny to me when I heard it nearly 20 years later. Too bad I didn’t trademark it back then.

More from this show

Catillate, Agelastic, and Latibulate

Inkhorn terms are bloated, fancy, show-off words formed by cramming Latin and Greek roots into English. The name references little bottles made from animal horn that 14th-century English scribes used to carry their ink. Lexicographer Henry...

All Out Are In Free!

Kylie Ryan, an elementary-school teacher in Seattle, Washington, remembers that when she played hide-and-seek as a child, the call for everyone to come in was alle alle oxen free. Are there other versions? Yes, and because these sayings were not...

Segments