spotted by chance; seems to refer to an old passwd.conf option name that
was merged in login.conf more than twenty years ago.  There doesn't seem
to be any mention left of "pwdtries" in share/ nor usr.bin/.

(btw, i thought it was undocumented since `apropos -k any=passwordtries`
doesn't yield anything, but it's actually documented in login.conf(5).)

diff 6030df50728950c94e1ff3d338db3caa5c1b1d9d 647a93ffe42b433ab4d87a99a3a16b315984cef5
commit - 6030df50728950c94e1ff3d338db3caa5c1b1d9d
commit + 647a93ffe42b433ab4d87a99a3a16b315984cef5
blob - cfdd14a8ad0e81110d3b6ce380b14132228cb1c7
blob + 9f935e49654f9020755775bbb8a198176a971768
--- usr.bin/passwd/pwd_check.c
+++ usr.bin/passwd/pwd_check.c
@@ -212,9 +212,9 @@ pwd_gettries(login_cap_t *lc)
 	if ((ntries = login_getcapnum(lc, "passwordtries", -1, -1)) != -1) {
 		if (ntries >= 0 && ntries <= INT_MAX)
 			return((int)ntries);
 		fprintf(stderr,
-		    "Warning: pwdtries out of range in /etc/login.conf");
+		    "Warning: passwordtries out of range in /etc/login.conf");
 	}
 
 	/*
 	 * If no amount of tries is specified, return a default of 3,