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Glite Dictionary
trywork

trywork

1 9.9
Equipment on a whaling ship that melts whale fat into oil
  • noun
  • /ˈtraɪˌwɜrk/
  • Archaic
: proceso de extracción de aceite de ballena
  • A tryworks was a facility where whale blubber could be boiled and the oil skimmed from the top.

Examples

  • Like a leviathan entangled in fluke chains and ready for the tryworks, the mountain had been pierced, trussed, tunneled, and disemboweled.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • Stoke up the tryworks.

    Moby Dick (1956)

  • They had quick and easy access to Russell's tryworks located on Centre Street.

    Blog text (25)

  • Centre Street Timeline c1750: Warehouses, candlehouse, and tryworks built.

    Blog text (25)

  • By having a land-based tryworks, whalers could focus on harvesting whales instead of processing them.

    Blog text (25)

  • A trywork is a crucial part of a whaling ship where whale blubber is melted into oil.

  • The crew gathered around the tryworks to start processing the blubber collected that day.

  • In the past, sailors relied on tryworks to convert whale blubber into useful oil for lighting lamps.

Surface Forms

trywork singular
tryworks plural

Morphology

trywork = try + work (opaque) = try + work

Although composed of familiar words 'try' + 'work', the specialized nautical sense ('equipment for rendering blubber') depends on a technical sense of 'try' that most learners do not know.

Etymology

Trywork comes from the idea of 'trying' whale blubber by heating it to get oil. Think of try as 'test' or 'get oil from' and work as the place or equipment, so a trywork is the ship's gear where blubber is 'tried' into oil.