Other forms: quarries, quarried, quarrying
A quarry is the wide open pit where stone is cut out of the ground. A grey stepped hole bitten into a hillside, dust over everything, a line of lorries carrying the blocks away.
Quarry is a verb as well — they quarried limestone here for two hundred years — and it stretches to research: you quarry an archive for facts. Then there is the other quarry, a different word that landed on the same spelling: the animal or person being hunted. A hawk's quarry, the detective's quarry, the fox that has gone to ground. That sense takes a possessive naturally — the hunter closed in on his quarry — and when someone says the police lost their quarry, nobody is thinking about stone. A quarry is open to the sky, which is what separates it from a mine.
1nounquarryA large open pit where stone, slate or gravel is cut or dug out of the ground.
“The village grew up around a slate quarry.”
synonyms: pit, workings
2nounpreyAn animal or person being hunted or chased.
“The hounds lost the scent and their quarry got away.”
3verbdigTo cut or dig stone out of the ground.
“The marble was quarried a few miles from the temple.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
quarry is a pit dug for stone.
The stone sense reaches English from Medieval Latin quarreria, a place where stones are squared, by way of Old French quarrière. Behind that stand Latin quadrō, to square, and quadra, a square, from quattuor, four. A quarry is named not for the hole but for the shape the blocks came out in — four-sided.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷetwóres — four
Latin
quadrō — to square
Vulgar Latin
*quadraria
Old French
quarrière
Medieval Latin
quarreria
Middle English
quarere
English, today
quarry
Built from
From Middle English quarere, from Medieval Latin quarreria (1266), literally a “place where stones are squared”, from Old French quarrière (compare modern French carrière), from Vulgar Latin quadraria, from Latin quadrō (“to square”), itself from quadra (“a square”), from quattuor (“four”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European kʷetwóres (“four”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA