quarriable

Quarriable is an adjective used to describe rock or material that can be extracted from a quarry. In common practice, the standard form is quarryable; quarriable is a rare variant found in a small number of older or technical texts. The term is most often applied to geological formations or stone resources that are suitable for quarrying without complex processing, as opposed to materials that require extensive milling or mining elsewhere.

Etymology and forms: Quarriable is formed from the noun quarry plus the suffix -able. The spelling with a double r reflects a pronunciation pattern found in some historical or dialectal usages. Modern, widely accepted practice generally prefers quarryable, and quarriable is not widely standardized in contemporary dictionaries.

Usage and attestations: Because it is seldom used, quarriable can be ambiguous and is often considered a variant or archaism. When encountered, it typically appears in technical, historical, or regional texts discussing resource extraction, geology, or civil engineering. In standard modern writing, quarryable is the preferred form to indicate extractability by quarrying.

See also: quarry, quarrying, quarryable, quarryman.