Other forms: hurried, hurries, hurrying
To hurry is to move or work faster because there is not enough time. Hurrying for the last train, hurrying the children into their coats, hurrying through a meal you would rather have taken slowly.
Hurry up is the everyday form when you are telling someone to get on with it; hurry on its own sounds clipped and urgent. It works on other people too — don't hurry me, they hurried him out of the building — and it makes a noun: in a hurry, what's the hurry, there's no hurry. That noun hides a second meaning, because in a hurry after a negative means willingly or easily, so I won't be doing that again in a hurry means it was awful. Hurry is the neutral word, rush is more panicked, and hasten is formal and mostly written.
1verbhurryTo move or do something more quickly than usual because time is short.
“If we hurry we can still catch the four o'clock.”
2verbfasterTo make someone or something go faster.
“Nobody could hurry the queue at passport control.”
3nounhasteThe need or wish to do something quickly.
“He left in such a hurry that he forgot his keys.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: rush
Middle English horien meant to rush or impel, probably a twist on hurren, to vibrate rapidly or buzz — the noise of something moving too fast to see properly. That goes back to Proto-Germanic *hurzaną, to rush, and to the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱers-, to run, which also gave Latin currō. Horse belongs to the same family, which fits: for most of history the fastest way to hurry had four legs.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱers- — to run
Proto-Germanic
*hurzaną — to rush
Middle English
horien — to rush, impel
English, today
hurry
Built from
From Middle English horien (“to rush, impel”), probably a variation of hurren (“to vibrate rapidly, buzz”), from Proto-Germanic hurzaną (“to rush”) (compare Middle High German hurren (“to hasten”), Norwegian hurre (“to whirl around”)), from Proto-Indo-European ḱers- (“to run”) (compare Latin currō (“to run”), xto kursär/txb kwarsär (“league; course”)). Related to hurr, horse, rush. Alternative etymology derives hurry as a variant of harry.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA