Word.ws English Dictionary

pretrain

pretrain verb: to train before testing or further training.

Verb

pretrain (third-person singular simple present pretrains, present participle pretraining, simple past and past participle pretrained)

  1. To train before testing or further training.
    • In stage one, rats were pretrained to drink from a rotary device.
  2. (machine learning) To train (a neural network) on a large corpus or other dataset to acquire a base of general-purpose knowledge, representations, or capabilities that can subsequently be adapted, specialized, or aligned through further training.
    • Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation.2015, Hyeonseob Nam, Bohyung Han, “Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking”, in arXiv

Forms of pretrain

third-person singular presentpretrains
present participlepretraining
past participlepretrained
pastpretrained
alternative formpre-train

Origin of pretrain

From pre- + train.

Questions about pretrain

What does pretrain mean?
Pretrain means to train before testing or further training.
What part of speech is pretrain?
Pretrain is a verb.
What is the past tense of pretrain?
The past tense of pretrain is pretrained.

Words near pretrain in the dictionary

  1. pretracheal
  2. pretracheophyte
  3. pretracheophytes
  4. pretrade
  5. pretraditional
  6. pretrain
  7. pretrained
  8. pretraining
  9. pretrains
  10. pretransaction
  11. pretransactional

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretrain (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pretrain.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pretrain. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.