trace

Meaning

Noun

1. An act of tracing.
2. An enquiry sent out for a missing article, such as a letter or an express package.
3. A mark left as a sign of passage of a person or animal.
4. A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
5. A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
6. A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board.
7. An informal road or prominent path in an arid area.
8. One of two straps, chains, or ropes of a harness, extending from the collar or breastplate to a whippletree attached to a vehicle or thing to be drawn; a tug.
9. A connecting bar or rod, pivoted at each end to the end of another piece, for transmitting motion, especially from one plane to another; specifically, such a piece in an organ stop action to transmit motion from the trundle to the lever actuating the stop slider.
10. The ground plan of a work or works.
11. The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
12. The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
13. An empty category occupying a position in the syntactic structure from which something has been moved, used to explain constructions such as wh-movement and the passive.
14. A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data.

Adj

Extremely small or insignificant (of an amount or quantity).

Verb

1. (transitive) To follow the trail of.
2. To follow the history of.
3. (transitive) To draw or sketch lightly or with care.
4. (transitive) To copy onto a sheet of paper superimposed over the original, by drawing over its lines.
5. (obsolete, transitive) To copy; to imitate.
6. (intransitive, obsolete) To walk; to go; to travel.
7. (obsolete, transitive) To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.
8. (transitive) To follow the execution of the program by making it to stop after every instruction, or by making it print a message after every step.

Synonyms

track

mark

vestige

trail

sign

draw

clue

follow

hint

spoor

evidence

shadow

footprint

👣

indication

touch

tracing

tracks

suggestion

print

delineate

copy

tincture

pursue

mark out

imprint

describe

decipher

hunt

traces

scar

impression

ghost

👻

observe the precepts

atom

outline

paint

dog

🐕

behave

remains

tinge

line

find

🔍

sketch

search

duplicate

retrace

speck

colour

plot

point

Translations

trace

Spur

tracer

rastro

traccia

nachspüren

spoor

huella

👣

rastrear

calquer

tracciare

indicio

traza

ίχνος

vestígio

Pronounced as (IPA)

/tɹeɪs/

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English: trace

Inherited from Middle English: tracen

In summary

From Middle English trace, traas, from Old French trace (“an outline, track, trace”), from the verb (see below).