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Try can be a noun or a verb.

try used as a noun:

  1. An attempt.
    "I gave unicycling a try but I couldn’t do it."
  2. An act of tasting or sampling.
    "I gave sushi a try but I didn’t like it."
  3. A score in rugby, analogous to a touchdown in American football.
    "Today I scored my first try."

Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →

try used as a verb:

  1. To attempt. Followed by infinitive, the attempt fails or is expected to fail.
    "I tried to rollerblade, but I couldn’t."
  2. To make an experiment. Usually followed by a present participle.
    "I tried mixing more white paint to get a lighter shade."
  3. To work on something.
    "You are trying too hard."
  4. To put to test.
    "I shall try my skills on this"
  5. To taste, sample, etc.
    "Try this—you’ll love it."
  6. To put on trial.
    "He was tried and executed."
  7. To tire.
    "You are trying my patience."

Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →

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What type of word is try?

As detailed above, 'try' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: I gave unicycling a try but I couldn’t do it.
  2. Noun usage: I gave sushi a try but I didn’t like it.
  3. Noun usage: Today I scored my first try.
  4. Verb usage: I tried to rollerblade, but I couldn’t.
  5. Verb usage: I tried mixing more white paint to get a lighter shade.
  6. Verb usage: You are trying too hard.
  7. Verb usage: I shall try my skills on this
  8. Verb usage: Try this—you’ll love it.
  9. Verb usage: He was tried and executed.
  10. Verb usage: You are trying my patience.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of try are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of try, and guess at its most common usage.

Word Type

For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

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