Oddly enough, in the earliest use of hurry, in the last years of the sixteenth century, it was nothing more than a variant of hurly, meaning “disturbance, tumult.”
That is the sense in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Act IV, Scene vi): “His remedies are tame, the present peace, And quietnesse of the people, which before Were in wilde hurry.”
And, in fact, through the next century or two we had hurry-burry, hurry-durry, and hurry-curry, all imitating hurly-burly, before finally settling upon hurry-scurry in the middle of the eighteenth century.
But not only was hurry coined in this manner; so was scurry, though it did not find separate place in the language until another hundred years had passed.
