[f. QUARRY sb.2]
1. trans. To obtain (stone, etc.) by the processes employed in a quarry. Also with out.
1774. Goldsmith, Hist. Earth, v. In the mountains of Castravan … they quarry out a white stone.
1811. Pinkerton, Petral., II. 57. It is quarried at Vulpino, 15 leagues from Milan.
1853. Kane, Grinnell Exp., xxx. (1856), 258. Now we had to quarry out the blocks [of ice] in flinty, glassy lumps.
1872. Yeats, Growth Comm., 39. Higher up the river valley were quarried the massive syenite slabs used in the erection of their temples.
b. fig. To obtain or extract by laborious methods.
1860. Maury, Phys. Geog. Sea, x. (Low), § 465. Materials which a certain kind of insect quarried from the sea water.
1868. J. H. Blunt. Ref. Ch. Eng., I. 361. His only object was to quarry gold and silver out of the monastic treasuries.
2. To form a quarry in, to cut into (rock, etc.).
1847. Emerson, Poems, The House. She ransacks mines and ledges, And quarries every rock.
1866. Liddon, Bampt. Lect., i. (1875), 34. The rocky hillside is no longer beautiful when it has been quarried.
1877. Amelia B. Edwards, Up Nile, v. 120. The rocky barrier … quarried here and there in dazzling gaps of snow-white cuttings.
3. intr. To cut or dig in, or as in, a quarry.
1848. Kingsley, Saint’s Trag., II. x. Something did strike my heart … Which quarries daily there with dead dull pain.
1874. L. Stephen, Hours in Library (1892), I. x. 345. The industrious will find … waste paper in which they may quarry to their heart’s content.
Hence Quarrying vbl. sb. Also pl. and attrib.
1823. Crabb, Quarryings, pieces that are broken off from the different materials that are wrought in quarries.
1854. H. Miller, Sch. & Schm., xiii. (1860), 138. On first commencing our quarrying operations.
1865. Swinburne, Poems & Ball., Orchard, 33. No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn.
