Quarrying

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process of extracting stone or mineral resources from the earth's surface involves both excavation and the careful removal of natural materials
2. This activity encompasses the extraction of valuable resources such as stone and minerals from rock formations through systematic digging
3. Extracting materials like stone from a mine or an open pit involves numerous techniques aimed at the efficient harvest of natural resources

Etymology: Quarry has two unrelated origins, and the one that matters for stone is the older-looking one that turns out to be about squares. Medieval Latin "quarreria" described a place where stones were squared, and it passed into Old French as "quarrière", the ancestor of modern French "carrière". The Latin root is "quadrare", "to square", which goes back to "quadra", a square, and ultimately to the number four. So the word for digging stone is, at heart, a word about shaping it into blocks. The sense of a pit or excavation for stone is what English took, arriving in Middle English as "quarere". That same spelling family also tangles with an entirely different word: a hunter's "quirre" was the deer's entrails given to hounds as a reward, from an Anglo-Norman word traceable to Latin "cor", heart. Because the two words collided in form, the hunting sense has nothing to do with the stone sense. The participle "quarrying" follows the verb's ordinary pattern, so the story stays with the noun. A third, separate source, "quarrel", meaning a diamond-shaped pane of stained glass or a square tile, has also influenced the spelling, but the stone-pit meaning comes from the squaring root.

Synonyms: excavating, mining, digging, extracting, harvesting