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''trace'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''trace'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260305143651-00-⌔

trace - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

trace (plural traces)

  • An act of tracing.
    • ✤ Your cell phone company can put a trace on your line.
  • 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.
    • ✤ Synonyms: track, trail
    • ✤ Those are the times you write it off, experience/Walk away, and leave no trace/Cause that night, love had no face1
  • A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
    • ✤ Synonym: show
    • ✤ Synonyms: see Thesaurus: modicum
    • ✤ There are traces of chocolate around your lips.
    • ✤ All of our chocolates may contain traces of nuts.
    • (meteorology) A small amount of rain, not enough to be measured.
    • ✤ The highway to the East Coast which ran through the borough of Ebbfield had always been a main road and even now, despite the vast garages, the pylons and the gaily painted factory glasshouses which had sprung up beside it, there still remained an occasional trace of past cultures.2
    • ✤ And by mornin’
      Gone was any trace of you, I think I am finally clean      3
  • (electronics) 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.
  • (engineering) 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.
  • (fortification) The ground plan of a work or works.
  • (geometry) The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
  • (linear algebra) The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
  • (grammar) 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.
    • ✤ [S]upposing the NP has raised in (18), the potential bindees are the clitic and the trace of the focalized NP, neither of which qualifies as a syntactic variable.4
  • (programming) A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data.
  • (semiotics) A signifier approximated in the absence of stable signified.
    • ✤ Hypernym: floating signifier

Adjective

trace (comparative more trace, superlativemost trace or tracest)

  • Extremely small or insignificant (of an amount or quantity).
    • ✤ Vena contracta is defined as the narrowest portion of the regurgitant jet, seen at its origin. In all of the cases, it was assumed that the MR severity was downgraded by general anesthesia because of reduced afterload conditions. In cases where MR was determined to be trace, mild, or moderate, the afterload was manipulated by bolus injections of phenylephrine to approximate the preanesthesia, awake blood pressure. The final MR grade was assigned after this maneuver was completed. If conflicting results were observed for different criteria, the reviewing anesthesiologist made a judgment as to the final grade of MR.5
    • ✤ Through the above, it is clear that the students of the experimental group who studied the unit of similarity of triangles according to the model (4mat) have outperformed the students of the control group who studied the same unit in the traditional way in the results of the systemic thinking measurement. It was also found that the students of the experimental group have been developing their geometric tendencies more than the students of the control group, and this is due to the use of the (4mat) model. It provided the opportunity for students to overcome many difficulties by giving them the opportunity to discover data for themselves, because it allowed them to recognize similar triangles through their own thinking patterns and transition as the information discovered remains more trace than the information that is taught to students in the traditional way.6
    • ✤ As indicated in Chomsky (1982), the empty element in (26a) has an antecedent with an independent 0-role and is therefore PRO rather than trace. Subjacency is violated, but nevertheless PRO and its antecedent can be coindexed, as is generally possible for anaphors, apart from trace (in (26c), the coindexing of they and each other violates subjacency). In (26b), the antecedent of the empty element is in a non-0-position, so the empty element is trace. Subjacency is violated as in (26a), but in this case, the sentence is ungrammatical.⁹ Thus subjacency appears to be a property of the rule Move α, not of other indexing mechanisms. If this conclusion is correct, then clearly we will have to distinguish between the indexing mechanism at work in (25a) or (26b) — i.e. Move α — and the one at work in (25b-c) or (26a,c).7

Verb

trace (third-person singular simple present traces, present participle tracing, simple past and past participle traced)

  • (transitive) To follow the trail of.
    • ✤ I feel thy power […] to trace the ways/Of highest agents.8
    • ✤ Happy the mortal, who has traced effects
      To their first cause      9
  • To follow the history of.
    • ✤ You may trace the deluge quite round the globe.10
    • ✤ They traced the ancient lineages of two species to reveal the insects’ lengthy history of asexual reproduction.11
  • (transitive) To draw or sketch lightly or with care.
    • ✤ He carefully traced the outlines of the old building before him.
  • (transitive) To copy onto a sheet of paper superimposed over the original, by drawing over its lines.
  • (transitive, obsolete) To copy; to imitate.
    • ✤ That servile path thou nobly dost decline,/Of tracing word by word, and line by line.12
  • (intransitive, obsolete) To walk; to go; to travel.
    • ✤ Not wont on foote with heavy armes to trace.13
  • (transitive, obsolete) To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.
    • ✤ We do trace this alley up and down.14
  • (computing, 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.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /tɹeɪs/, (sometimes) [tʃɹeɪs]
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -eɪs

Etymology 1

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

Etymology 2

From Middle English tracen, from Old French tracer, trasser (“to delineate, score, trace”, also, “to follow, pursue”), probably a conflation of Vulgar Latin ﹡tractiō (“to delineate, score, trace”), from Latin trahere (“to draw”); and Old French traquer (“to chase, hunt, pursue”), from trac (“a track, trace”), from Middle Dutch treck, treke (“a drawing, draft, delineation, feature, expedition”). More at track.

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1983, Ashford & Simpson, “Experience (Love Had No Face)”, in High-Rise (album): ↩

  2. 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 7, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 2014 October 27, Taylor Swift, Imogen Heap, “Clean (Taylor’s Version)”, in 1989 (Taylor’s Version) ‎, performed by Taylor Swift, published 27 October 2023: ↩

  4. 1999, Georges Rebuschi, Laurice Tuller, The Grammar of Focus, page 290: ↩

  5. 2005, Schroder JN, Williams ML, Hata JA, Muhlbaier LH, Swaminathan M, Mathew JP, Glower DD, O’Connor CM, Smith PK, Milano CA, Impact of Mitral Valve Regurgitation Evaluated by Intraoperative Transesophageal Echocardiography on Long-Term Outcomes After Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting: ↩

  6. 2024, Wafiq Hibi, Using The (4mat) Model in Teaching The Triangles Similarity Unit For The Ninth Grade: ↩

  7. 2025, Aoun, Joseph, The Status of Movement Rules: ↩

  8. 1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a] nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a] nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC: ↩

  9. c. 1792, William Cowper, On a Similar Occasion for the Year 1792: ↩

  10. 1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth ↩

  11. 2011 July 19, Ella Davies, “Sticks insects survive one million years without sex”, in BBC ‎: ↩

  12. 1647, John Denham, To Sir Richard Fanshaw: ↩

  13. 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto III”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 29: ↩

  14. 1598–1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “Much Adoe about Nothing”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]: ↩

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