Passive of "tried to eat"


OK, so I'm trying to complete the following analogy:



John ate the worms.



is to



The worms were eaten.



as



John tried to eat the worms.



is to



The worms were tried to be eaten.



or



The worms were eaten attemptively.



... ? I feel like such an inarticulate fool sometimes.


Edit: I'm not asking which of the two possibilities is better, but how I might complete the analogy, preferably with "the worms" as the subject. This is so that I can write something like



The worms were stolen, taken to John's house, and [tried to be eaten].



Sorry if my question wasn't clear.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?