trial and error

American  

noun

1. experimentation or investigation in which various methods or means are tried and faulty ones eliminated in order to find the correct solution or to achieve the desired result or effect.

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trial and error British  

noun

1. a method of discovery, solving problems, etc, based on practical experiment and experience rather than on theory

   he learned to cook by trial and error

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trial and error Cultural  

1. To “proceed by trial and error” is to experiment, rejecting what does not work and adopting what does.

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trial and error Idioms  

1. An attempt to accomplish something by trying various means until the correct one is found. for example, The only way to solve this problem is by trial and error. The error here alludes to the failed means or attempts, which are discarded until the right way is found. [c. 1800]

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Other Word Forms

• trial-and-error adjective

Etymology

Origin of trial and error

First recorded in 1800–10

Example Sentences

Developing new rockets involves trial and error—and sometimes, explosions.

From The Wall Street Journal

They geeked out about continual learning, where AI gets smarter as it absorbs new information, and reinforcement learning, or “RL,” a technique in which the models learn through trial and error.

From The Wall Street Journal

Her own brother and sister met their spouses on Bumble, albeit after years of trial and error.

From The Wall Street Journal

"It was just a single interaction from thousands of interactions. If we don't do the simulation and instead did this work by trial and error, it could have taken years to find," said Liu.

From Science Daily

It was a lot of trial and error: putting stuff on, taking it off, putting it on again.

From The Wall Street Journal