cuirée
cuirée
Old French
“The word for hunted prey comes from the French word for the entrails placed on a hide as a reward for hunting dogs—the kill's aftermath, not the chase.”
In medieval French hunting, the cuirée (from cuir, 'hide' or 'leather') was the ritual reward given to the hunting dogs after a successful kill. The heart, liver, and entrails of the slain deer would be placed on the animal's hide and given to the hounds. This ceremony was an important part of the formalized hunt.
English borrowed the word as quarry in the 1300s, initially meaning the pile of entrails on the hide—the dogs' reward. But over time, the meaning shifted backward along the hunt: from the aftermath (the reward) to the object of the chase (the prey itself). The thing the dogs earned became the thing they were chasing.
This backward shift—from consequence to cause—is unusual in etymology. Most words move forward in time (from origin to result). Quarry moved backward: from what happens after the kill to what happens before it.
Meanwhile, English has a completely separate word quarry meaning a stone pit, from Latin quadrare ('to square'). The two quarries—hunted prey and stone pit—share a spelling but no common origin. They are perfect homonyms: identical in form, unrelated in meaning, and constantly confused in etymological dictionaries.
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Today
Quarry is unusual because it names the prey from the predator's perspective—not what the animal is, but what it is to the hunter. A deer is only a quarry when someone is chasing it.
The backward etymological journey—from reward to prey—mirrors how obsession works. We often define what we want by imagining its aftermath. The quarry is not the deer; it's the promise of the cuirée.
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