Definition of "curry"

Your short horse is soon curried.

1610–1614, John Fletcher, “The Tragedie of Valentinian”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, Act II, scene i

One day I was out in the barn and he drifted in. I was currying the horse and he set down on the wheelbarrow and begun to ask questions.

1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 11, in Mr. Pratt's Patients

I have seen him curry a fellow's carcase handsomely.

c. 1619–1621, John Fletcher, “The Island Princesse”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, Act IV, scene ii

[…] By setting brother against brother / To claw and curry one another.

1662, [Samuel Butler], “[The First Part of Hudibras]”, in Hudibras. The First and Second Parts. […], London: […] John Martyn and Henry Herringman, […], published 1678; republished in A[lfred] R[ayney] Waller, editor, Hudibras: Written in the Time of the Late Wars, Cambridge: University Press, 1905, canto I

A middle-aged woman waves and calls to her, as if she, like the hungry reporters, were currying the girl's favor: Florence Aadland (Sarandon, in a wily, multilayered performance), Beverly's mother, wears an expression of maternal concern, though her self-serving motives become increasingly clear.

2014 August 27, Stephanie Zacharek, “The Last of Robin Hood Wrestles with a Star's Underage Love”, in The Village Voice‎, archived from the original on 2014-09-03

The easiest way to curry parameters is to create a function that takes a parameter block and returns a function that will call the original function with the presupplied parameters as defaults […] .

2011, Zachary Kessin, Programming HTML5 Applications: Building Powerful Cross-Platform Environments in JavaScript, "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", page 21

Next, we curry the avg function to 3 arguments and put it into an option.

2015, Leonardo Borges, Clojure Reactive Programming, Packt Publishing Ltd, page 194

I am not hee that can ... by midnight leape my horse, curry seauen miles.

1608, George Chapman, The Conspiracie, and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, section 2.245

All these shots shall curry or finish their ranges in times equal to each other.

1662, Thomas Salusbury, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogue Two)

A sermon is soon curryed over.

1676, Andrew Marvell, Mr. Smirke, section 34