tries

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of try.

   Whenever the engine stalls, she tries the ignition twice before calling for help.

   The team tries a new strategy in the closing minutes of each match.

   Note

   The everyday present-tense form follows the regular rule: a consonant plus y becomes -ies before the ending. What follows it decides the meaning. With an infinitive it describes an attempt. With an -ing form it describes an experiment, testing whether something will work. Older senses of the verb are obsolete: refining metal from ore, rendering blubber for oil, and winnowing grain.

   He tries to lift the crate but cannot budge it.

   If the lid sticks, she tries tapping it with a spoon.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of try.

   It took three tries before the rocket cleared the launch tower.

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

   Note

   The plural that counts attempts and, on a rugby pitch, counts points: a winger scores tries the way an American footballer scores touchdowns. Chess-problem composers use it too, for moves that nearly solve the problem until Black finds the single defense that refutes them. The same spelling serves the verb meaning "attempts". A number or determiner marks the noun (three tries), and a subject marks the verb (she tries).

3. 3
   noun

   Plural of trie.

   The autocomplete system stores its dictionaries in two separate tries for speed.

   Engineers compared the memory usage of several tries before settling on one design.

   Note

   A programmer's plural: one trie, two tries. Each is an ordered tree that stores an associative array, usually keyed by strings. On the page the plural looks exactly like the everyday word for attempts. In technical writing it helps to add a noun, as in trie structures or trie-based indexes, wherever a reader might take it the ordinary way. The obsolete trie, an old spelling of the verb try, is unrelated to this one.

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