Meanings
plural quaileries
- A structure in which one houses quail that are kept as a food animal.
The quail is notorious for its quarrelsomeness : being confined in cage or quailery, it has to be kept in the dark if it is to be kept alive.
1895, Sir Edward Braddon, Thirty Years of Shikar, page 643 more examples
A quailery should be dark (or the mailes will be always fighting), light being let in at early morning, at noon, and towards sunset, and the birds fed each time.
1880, Allan Octavian Hume, The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon, page 142In Behar every prudent English resident keeps a quailery, as well as a tealery, on his premises, and a dish of fat quail is a very agreeable and wholesome change of diet when the weather is hot.
1891 March, C.T. Buckland, “Some Birds in India”, in Longman's Magazine, volume 17Here are the fowl-house and the sheep-house, and the goat-house, and the cow-house, and the tealery, and the quailery, and the columbarie, and the extensive godowns, and all the other adjuncts of a large Anglo-Indian establishment of the olden time.
1891, Robert Edward Forrest, Eight Days, page 33
Origin
Cite this entry
quailery. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/quailery
“quailery.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/quailery. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “quailery,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/quailery.
Source: quailery on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.