Word.ws English Dictionary

trace

/tɹeɪs/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

sometimes[tʃɹeɪs]

trace noun: an act of tracing.

Noun

trace (plural traces)

  1. An act of tracing.
    • Your cell phone company can put a trace on your line.
  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.
    • Those are the times you write it off, experience / Walk away, and leave no trace / Cause that night, love had no face1983, Ashford & Simpson, “Experience (Love Had No Face)”, in High-Rise (album)
    Synonyms:
    track, trail
  4. A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
    • There are traces of chocolate around your lips.
    • All of our chocolates may contain traces of nuts.
    1. A small amount of rain, not enough to be measured.
  5. A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board.
  6. An informal road or prominent path in an arid area.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. The ground plan of a work or works.
  10. The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
  11. The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
  12. 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.1999, Georges Rebuschi, Laurice Tuller, The Grammar of Focus, page 290
  13. A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data.
  14. A signifier approximated in the absence of stable signified.

Adjective

trace (comparative more trace, superlative most trace or tracest)

  1. 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...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...
    • 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...2024, Wafiq Hibi, Using The (4mat) Model in Teaching The Triangles Similarity Unit For The Ninth Grade

Verb

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

  1. (transitive) To follow the trail of.
    • I feel thy power […] to trace the ways / Of highest agents.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...
    • Happy the mortal, who has traced effects
      To their first causec. 1792, William Cowper, On a Similar Occasion for the Year 1792
  2. To follow the history of.
    • You may trace the deluge quite round the globe.1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth
    • They traced the ancient lineages of two species to reveal the insects' lengthy history of asexual reproduction.2011 July 19, Ella Davies, “Sticks insects survive one million years without sex”, in BBC
  3. (transitive) To draw or sketch lightly or with care.
    • He carefully traced the outlines of the old building before him.
  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.
    • That servile path thou nobly dost decline, / Of tracing word by word, and line by line.1647, John Denham, To Sir Richard Fanshaw
  6. (intransitive, obsolete) To walk; to go; to travel.
    • Not wont on foote with heavy armes to trace.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto III”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 29
  7. (obsolete, transitive) To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.
    • We do trace this alley up and down.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]...
  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.

Proper noun capitalized: Trace

Trace

  1. (colloquial) A short form of the female given name Tracy or Tracey.

trace meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

trace in Hindi

mark left as a sign of passage
चिह्न cihna

trace in Tamil

ஆராய்ந்து கண்டுபிடி, உருவரை பதியவைத்துப்படி எடு, சிறிதளவு, சுவடு, தடம், தடம்பின்பற்று

trace in Marathi

ट्रेस

trace in Urdu

trace; clue
بھید bhed
trace, clue, vestige
نشان niśān
trace; mark; clue
کھوج khoj
More languagesFewer languages
trace in Bengali
হদিস hodiś, আসর aśor
trace in Telugu
జాడ jāḍa
trace in Malayalam
ചുവടു പിടിച്ചുപോകുക, തേടിക്കണ്ടുപിടിക്കുക, പിന്തുടർന്നു പിടിക്കുക, കണ്ടുപിടിക്കുക
trace in Kannada
ಜಾಡೆ, ಜಾಡು, ಜೇಡು, ಗುರುತು
trace in Punjabi
ਟਰੇਸ, ਟਰੇਸ ਕਰਨਾ
trace in Gujarati
ટ્રેસ, ટ્રેસ કરો
trace in Odia
ଟ୍ରେସ୍, ଟ୍ରେସ୍ କରନ୍ତୁ, ଟ୍ରେସ
trace in Sanskrit
पदं padaṃ
trace in Nepali
ट्रेस, ट्रेस गर्नुहोस्, ट्रेस गर्न
trace in Pashto
نښه náx̌a
trace in Tagalog
dasto
trace in Arabic
أَثَر ʔaṯar, لِوْحَة دَارَاتُ مَطَبُوعَة lawḥat dārāt maṭbūʕa
trace in Malay
bekas, menyusurgalurkan
trace in Indonesian
jejak
trace in Persian
اثر asar, رد rad
trace in Thai
การตามรอย, รอย rɔɔi, ร่องรอย rɔ̂ng-rɔɔi, ตามรอย
trace in Vietnamese
dấu, vết

Examples of trace in a sentence

  • 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.2005, Schroder JN, Williams ML, Hata JA, Muhlbaier LH, Swaminathan M, Mathew JP, Glower DD, O'Connor CM, Smith PK, Milano CA, Impact of...
  • 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.2025, Aoun, Joseph, The Status of Movement Rules:

All 40 example sentences with trace

Synonyms of trace

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of trace

Forms of trace

Noun
pluraltraces
Adjective
comparativemore trace
superlativemost trace
superlativetracest
Verb
third-person singular presenttraces
present participletracing
past participletraced
pasttraced

Past tense of trace: traced

Plural of trace: traces

Origin of trace

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

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.

Words formed from trace

Phrases with trace

Words that rhyme with trace

45 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about trace

What does trace mean?
Trace means an act of tracing.
What is trace in Hindi?
Trace in Hindi is चिह्न (cihna). See Trace meaning in Hindi.
How do you use trace in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is trace?
Trace can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce trace?
Trace is pronounced /tɹeɪs/.
What is the plural of trace?
The plural of trace is traces.

Words near trace in the dictionary

  1. Trabzon
  2. trabzonite
  3. TRAC
  4. tracable
  5. tracazolate
  6. trace
  7. trace down
  8. trace element
  9. trace elements
  10. trace fossil
  11. trace fossils

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trace (page history and authors); Trace (page history and authors); trace (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); trace (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); بھید (Urdu) (page history and authors); আসর (Bengali) (page history and authors); జాడ (Telugu) (page history and authors); trace (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); trace (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); trace (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); trace (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); trace (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); trace (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); نښه (Pashto) (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.

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