Quarries

How to spell quarries

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce quarries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does quarries mean?

1. nounOpen excavations from which stone, slate, or gravel is extracted.
2. verbCuts or extracts stone from an excavation; third-person singular form.

Quarries in a sentence

• noun

  The region was once dotted with limestone quarries that supplied the cathedral.

• verb

  The firm still quarries granite from the old hillside site.

• noun

  Several disused quarries have been flooded and turned into diving lakes.

• verb

  She quarries marble blocks that are shipped to sculptors abroad.

Where does quarries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This single spelling actually covers two words from two unrelated roots, which is part of what makes it interesting. The stone-pit 'quarry' comes through Old French quarriere into medieval English, and ultimately from the Latin quadraria, a place where squared stone was cut, built on quadrum meaning 'a square'. The hunting 'quarry', meaning the animal being pursued, has a completely different ancestry: it began as the Old French cuiree, the parts of a slain deer placed on the hide and given to the hounds, a term tied to cuir 'hide' (Latin corium) and influenced by cor 'heart'. Both words settled into English during the 1300s and 1400s, and by chance ended up spelled and sounded the same. The double r and the -ies ending are the spelling traps here, since the singular 'quarry' simply swaps the y for ies in the plural and the third-person verb form.

How the word is built

• quarr- (root, from Latin quadrum 'square stone' for the pit sense; from Old French cuiree for the prey sense)
• -ies (plural noun ending, or third-person singular verb ending)