trial and error
23
3.0
- noun
- /ˈtraɪəl ənd ˈɛrər/
:
prueba y error
- He solved the puzzle through trial and error, trying different combinations until he found the right one.
- learn through trial and error
- trial and error process
- involves trial and error
That's what I learnt to do through trial and error just by following my feeling.
- That's what I learnt to do through trial and error just by following my feeling.
- This has been a trial and error thing basically for the last year.
- And, and that's been a bit of almost trial and error and just working it out.
- It's by the brute force of human trial and error.
- And so the FODMAP diet is a sort of trial and error process.
- It can only be discovered through trial and error.
- It seems that nature doesn't need trial and error.
- It implied that the country would move forward by trial and error, with no clear end point to find.
- And a lot of this was then trial and error.
- Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial and error.
- And we have slowly worked with them, doing trial and error, learning each other, building a foundation.
- So what, what you need to do is just a lot of trial and error.
- Like, dude, where do you get the knowledge that saves you painful trial and error?
- In post production film, if you don't have the material you need to go through a trial and error process, you can't do it.
- But eventually you find the group that you want to work with and it's just trial and error and hit and miss.
Examples
-
It took time and trial and error to find treatments that did more good than harm.
-
After hours and hours of trial and error, we have it, the perfect spread of Nutella.
-
This has been a trial and error thing basically for the last year.
-
The basic approach is a trial and error approach.
-
There is more trial and error testing involved where you might think it's pretty good.
-
But after enough trial and error, after enough loss, I knew I was different.
-
After some trial and error, I came up with this pitch.
-
It's a matter of trial and error until the right drug or combination of drugs is found.
-
After two years of trial and error, I had learned some tricks about dealing with her.
Fiction book (2002) -
They learn by trial and error.
Synonyms
55
3.8
Trying new ideas or methods to see if they work
Antonyms
How Systematic
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase directly combines 'trial' (an attempt or test) and 'error' (a mistake) to denote a process of making attempts and learning from mistakes until one succeeds, so a learner who knows both constituent meanings can infer the idiom. This compositional logic is cross-linguistically common and follows a transparent noun + and + noun pattern, making it readily understandable at B1 level.
Etymology
Trial and error shows a simple idea: a trial is a try and an error is a mistake you make while testing. People would keep trying different small tests and learn from the mistakes, so the phrase means 'solve a problem by trying different ways until one works'.