Quarry

How to spell quarry

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce quarry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does quarry mean?

1. nounA large open pit from which stone, slate, or gravel is extracted.
2. nounAn animal or person being hunted, chased, or pursued.

Quarry in a sentence

• The old limestone quarry on the edge of town has flooded into a deep lake.

• The fox kept low in the grass, stalking its quarry before the final sprint.

• Trucks hauled crushed granite out of the quarry all morning.

• The detective tracked his quarry across three counties before making the arrest.

Where does quarry come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Quarry actually unites two unrelated words that happen to be spelled the same. The stone-pit sense descends from the medieval Latin quadraria, a place where blocks were squared off, built on quadrum meaning 'a square' and ultimately on quattuor, the Latin for 'four'; that same numeric root sits inside 'quadrant' and 'square', which is a useful reminder that early masons cut stone into neat four-sided blocks. The hunting sense has a completely separate ancestry, coming through Old French cuiree, the portion of a slain animal's entrails placed on the hide and fed to the hounds as a reward, from Latin corium meaning 'hide' or 'skin'. Over time that grisly reward came to stand for the hunted animal itself, and then for any prey or target of pursuit. Both senses settled into English by the late Middle Ages, and the spelling collapsed them into the single form 'quarry'. The doubled r and the unexpected -arry ending (rather than -erry) are the usual traps, since the word is pronounced with a single flapped sound that gives no hint of the two consonants.

How the word is built

• From Latin quadraria, the place where squared stones (quadrum) were cut; the homograph meaning prey comes from Old French cuiree, the entrails given to hounds, with no analysable English affixes.