Tries

How to spell tries

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tries

What does tries mean?

1. verbThird-person singular present of 'try': makes an attempt or effort to do something.
2. nounMore than one attempt or effort to do something.
3. nounPlural of the rugby score worth points, made by grounding the ball over the opponents' line.

Tries in a sentence

• verb

  He tries to finish the report before the deadline every month.

• noun

  After several tries he finally guessed the correct password.

• noun

  The winger scored two tries in the second half of the match.

• verb

  She always tries her best on the difficult exam questions.

• noun

  The puzzle took her three tries to solve completely.

• noun

  The team needed three more tries to overturn the deficit.

Where does tries come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the inflected form of 'try', which came into English in the 1300s from the Old French verb 'trier', meaning 'to pick out, sort, or sift'. The exact ancestor of that French word is uncertain, though it is often linked to a Late Latin root tied to grain threshing and separating good from bad. The earliest English senses leaned on that 'sifting' idea: to try something was to test or examine it, a meaning still alive in a courtroom, where a judge 'tries' a case. From testing came the everyday modern sense of making an attempt, while the sporting noun (a scoring move in rugby) grew from the older notion of a 'try' as an effort or attempt at goal. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: the base word ends in a consonant plus 'y', so the 'y' flips to 'i' and gains '-es', giving 'tries' rather than the wrong 'trys'.

How the word is built

• try (from Old French trier: to pick out, sift)
• -es (the y becomes i before the third-person or plural ending)