/ˈkwɒri/
[noun] A place where stone, rock, or minerals are cut and removed from the ground; also, an animal or person being hunted or chased. The word carries two very different meanings that come from two completely separate origins.
The animal you hunt and the pit you dig stone from are called the same word — but they have nothing to do with each other.
The word 'quarry' holds a fascinating secret: it is actually two entirely different words that happen to look and sound identical in modern English. This is a case linguists call a homonym — same form, separate histories — and tracing both roots reveals two surprisingly rich stories.
The 'quarry' that means a pit or open mine for extracting stone comes from the Medieval Latin word 'quarreia', a derivative of 'quadrus', meaning 'square' or 'squared'. This is because the earliest stone workers cut blocks of stone into squared shapes for building. The chain runs like this: Latin 'quadrus' → Medieval Latin 'quarreia' → Old French 'quarriere' → Middle English 'quarrere' or 'quarry'. By the 14th century, English speakers were using it to describe the place itself — the open, excavated site from which dressed stone was removed — not just the squared stone. From this same Latin root 'quadrus' we also get words like 'square', 'quadrant', and 'quarter', all sharing that sense of four-sided, measured shape.
The second 'quarry' — meaning the prey being hunted, the target of a chase — has an entirely different and more dramatic origin. It comes from the Old French word 'cuiree', which referred to a specific ritual of the hunt: the reward of entrails placed on the animal's hide and given to the hounds after a successful kill. The word 'cuiree' itself derived from Old French 'cuir', meaning 'hide' or 'leather', which came from Latin 'corium', meaning 'skin' or 'hide'. So the original meaning was not the hunted animal itself, but the bloody offering placed upon its skin. The chain is: Latin 'corium' → Old French 'cuir' → Old French 'cuiree' → Middle English 'querre' → English 'quarry'.
Over time, this hunting-ritual word shifted its meaning. By the 15th and 16th centuries, English speakers had generalised 'quarry' to mean the hunted creature itself — the deer, the fox, the bird — rather than just the post-hunt reward. From there, the meaning broadened even further, so that by the modern era we could speak of a detective's quarry, a predator's quarry, or a spy's quarry, applying the word to any pursuit, not just animals in a forest.
What makes this pair of words so delightful is how their meanings have come to feel connected even though they share no bloodline. A quarry in stone is something you dig into, extract, pursue with tools. A quarry in hunting is something you pursue across open ground. Both words carry a sense of relentless effort toward a goal that resists you. Language, in one of its happiest accidents, gave the same sound to two ideas that share an emotional logic — the hard work of getting something that does not give itself up easily.