  We study the closed-string spectrum of SU(N) gauge theories in the
fundamental representation in 2+1 dimensions. We calculate the energies of the
lowest lying ~ 30 states using a large variety of operators characterised by
the quantum numbers of parity and longitudinal momentum. We find that our
results for the ground state are very well approximated by the Nambu-Goto (NG)
predictions even for short strings. For the excited states, we observe
significant deviations from the NG predictions only for very short strings and
they decrease rapidly with increasing string length. Finally, we see that
Nambu-Goto provides a much better description of our results than the effective
string theoretical predictions. We discuss the continuum and large-N limits.
