quarry

Pluralquarries

Formsquarries, quarrying, quarried

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An open excavation site where stone such as limestone, marble, or slate is extracted from the ground.

   The limestone quarry has operated for more than a century.

   Several abandoned quarries now fill with rainwater and serve as lakes.

   Similarpit, excavation

   Note

   The name records the work: Medieval Latin quarreria was a place where stones are squared, going back through Latin quadrō to quattuor, "four". A quarry is worked open to the sky, unlike a mine that follows deposits underground, and it is usually named for its stone, as in a limestone quarry or the marble quarry at Carrara. The hunter's quarry is a different word entirely, descended from Latin cor, "heart".

2. 2
   noununcountable

   An animal, frequently a bird or mammal, that is the target of a hunt.

   The hounds finally cornered their quarry at the edge of the wood.

   Lions stalk their quarry patiently through the tall grass.

   Similarprey, game, target, victim

   Oppositepredator, hunter

   Note

   Hunting language uses it as a mass noun as well as for a single animal. Hunters "comb the surrounding forests for quarry" with no article, much as they hunt for game. Birds fit it as naturally as mammals: Roger L'Estrange in 1692 already applies it to crows, buzzards and jackdaws. For a person or a goal rather than an animal, the word shifts to the sense of pursuit.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A person or thing that is the object of someone's search or pursuit.

   The investigators closed in on their quarry after a long pursuit.

   The rare first edition was the collector's elusive quarry.

   Similartarget, prey, object, goal

   Note

   The word spread from animals to anyone or anything hunted. The BBC in 2007 calls a wanted al-Qaeda figure the State Department's "quarry". Unlike the hunter's mass noun, it counts and usually takes a possessive, as in their quarry, its quarry or the collector's quarry, so it names the pursuer along with the pursued. Spenser spells it quarrey in The Faerie Queene of 1596.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To extract stone from the earth by cutting or removing it from an open pit.

   Workers quarry granite from the ridge using heavy machinery.

   Ancient builders quarried limestone to construct their great temples.

   Similarextract, excavate, mine, dig, cut

   Note

   The verb normally takes the stone as its object, so people quarry granite or quarry marble. It can also turn around and make the stone itself the subject: George C. Furber in 1847 describes limestone that "quarries out regularly and easily", soft when first quarried and hardening in the air. That construction describes how a stone behaves under the tools, not who is doing the cutting.

5. 5
   verbfigurativelytransitive

   To obtain or extract something slowly through long, painstaking searching.

   Historians quarry forgotten details from centuries of private correspondence.

   She quarried the decisive quotation from a thousand pages of transcripts.

   Similarextract, mine, unearth, glean, dig

   Note

   The stonecutter's verb carried into the library, where a body of writing is treated as rock to be cut. Its object can be the text being mined (in 1892 F. G. Kenyon says Aristotle's work was "largely quarried" by later grammarians) or what comes out of it, usually with out: quarry out facts, quarry out a vein of liberalism. Keep it apart from the "object of pursuit" noun, which comes from hunting, not stone.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A diamond-shaped tile or pane, frequently made of glass or stone.

   The leaded window was made up of dozens of small glass quarries.

   A single cracked quarry let the rain seep through the casement.

   Similarlozenge, diamond

   Note

   A window-maker's word that only looks like the stone pit. It is an alteration of quarrel, a name for a diamond-shaped piece of colored glass in a stained-glass window or a square tile. In Anthony Nixon's 1615 text, boys at stoolball break "a quarry of the glass", and a 1767 window shows "fractured quarries". The plural is quarries, the same for panes as for pits.

7. 7
   verbintransitive

   To seize prey; to hunt and capture, as a vulture or harpy does.

   The great raptors quarry across the valley each spring.

   The harpy quarried upon any creature unlucky enough to cross the marsh.

   Similarprey, hunt

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