prey
- 1A living creature, usually an animal, that is hunted and eaten by another.
Hawks scan the open ground for prey moving in the grass.
When prey grows scarce, foxes range much farther for food.
Note
In natural-history writing prey often works as a collective: "some insect prey take advantage" of clutter, with a plural verb and no -s, though preys exists as a plural. Like the seizing-and-devouring sense, it names the hunted, but here the range runs from rabbits to moths. To make easy prey is to be left exposed to whatever hunts.
- 2To behave as a predator, hunting and feeding on other animals.
Hawks prey on rodents that venture into open fields.
Several bat species prey almost exclusively on night-flying insects.
Note
The verb grew partly from the noun and partly from Old French praer, from Late Latin praedō. It is usually followed by on or upon, and that preposition carries into the passive: wild things "preyed and were preyed upon". Used with no object, as in that line, it simply says that hunting is what the creature does.
- 3A creature that an animal seizes, or may seize, in order to devour it.
The crocodile dragged its prey beneath the surface of the river.
Pack hunters can bring down prey far larger than any single member.
Note
The hunter's sense carries a robber's history. Middle English preye came through Old French preie from Latin praeda, a word for plunder and booty, and predator shares that root. The noun works as both a count and a mass word. In Dryden's "Theodore and Honoria" (1700) she "sees herself the monster's prey", and the possessive names whose meal she is to be.
- 4A person or thing that is given up to or victimized by a hostile force.
Tourists who flash cash quickly become prey for skilled pickpockets.
She fell prey to the con artist's smooth promises.
Oppositepredator
Note
Figurative prey lives in a few fixed frames: fall prey to, easy prey to, the prey of. The hostile force need not be a creature at all. In Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (1899) a helmsman becomes "the prey of an abject funk", and a rigid railway is easy prey to road competition. After fall or easy the noun takes no article; after become it often takes the.
- 5A person or other living thing that falls victim to a disease.
The epidemic took the elderly as its earliest prey.
Malnourished populations readily become prey to infectious disease.
Similarvictim
Less common meanings
- 6Goods or other property taken by violence, especially seized by force from an enemy in war.
The raiders loaded their ships with prey seized from the coastal towns.
After the siege, the general distributed the prey among his officers.
Similarloot, booty, plunder, spoil
Note
Here prey is loot rather than quarry. This archaic use stands nearest to the Latin word for plunder behind the hunting sense. The King James Bible of 1611 lists "the captiues, and the pray, and the spoile" together, spelling it pray. Modern English says spoils, booty or plunder. Use prey for seized goods only when echoing older prose, or readers will picture an animal.
- 7The action of devouring other creatures; destruction wrought by feeding upon them.
The villagers dreaded the bear's prey upon their livestock through the lean months.
Such was the wolves' prey that scarcely a lamb survived the season.
Note
Shakespeare's King Lear uses prey for the activity itself. "Hog in sloth, fox in stealth, … lion in prey" sets it beside sloth and stealth as a defining habit. This archaic noun of action has given way to the verb: where Shakespeare wrote lion in prey, a modern writer would say the lion preys.
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Practice
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Origins
From Middle English preye, borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Old French preie, a variant of proie, from Latin praeda.
From Middle English praien, partly from the noun and partly from Old French praer (earlier preder), from Late Latin praedō, a form of Latin praedor, from praeda ("plunder, booty, loot").