trace

Meanings

Noun

• An act of tracing.
• An enquiry sent out for a missing article, such as a letter or an express package.
• A mark left as a sign of passage of a person or animal.
• A residue of some substance or material.
• A very small amount.
• A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board.
• An informal road or prominent path in an arid area.
• 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.
• 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.
• The ground plan of a work or works.
• The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
• The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
• 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.

Verb

• To follow the trail of.
• To follow the history of.
• To draw or sketch lightly or with care.
• To copy onto a sheet of paper superimposed over the original, by drawing over its lines.
• To copy; to imitate.
• To walk; to go; to travel.
• To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.
• 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.

Related

Similar words

• track, trail

Origin

• From Middle English trace, traas, from Old French trace, from the verb (see below).
• From Middle English tracen, from Old French tracer, trasser, probably a conflation of Vulgar Latin *tractiō ("to delineate, score, trace"), from Latin trahere ("to draw"); and Old French traquer, from trac, from Middle Dutch treck, treke. More at track.