Using regular expressions to search a word list. Finding 2 letter words instead of 3. Why?

I am studying regular expressions and I am stumped. Here is my process so far....

I downloaded this file.

wget http://ift.tt/1tvTvBp
mv corncob_lowercase.txt words.txt

I wanted all 3 letter words...

grep '^...$' words.txt

This DOES finds "abe"

grep '^abe.$' words.txt

This does NOT find "abe"

grep '^abe$' words.txt

This DOES find "abe" in the library that came with Arch Linux.

grep '^abe$' /usr/share/dict/cracklib-small

I am stumped on this one.