trace /tɹeɪs/noun 15verb 8adjective 1forms 8phrases 3 noun15 •a mark that a person or an animal leaves behind when passing through a placeThose are the times you write it off, experience / Walk away, and leave no trace / Cause that night, love had no face — 1983 •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. •A small amount of rain, not enough to be measured. •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. •The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix. •A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board. •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. •An informal road or prominent path in an arid area. •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 •A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data. •The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane. •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. •A signifier approximated in the absence of stable signified. verb8 •To follow the trail of.I feel thy power […] to trace the ways / Of highest agents. — 1667 •To follow the history of.You may trace the deluge quite round the globe. — 1684 •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. •To copy onto a sheet of paper superimposed over the original, by drawing over its lines. •To draw or sketch lightly or with care.He carefully traced the outlines of the old building before him. •(no longer used) To copy; to imitate.That servile path thou nobly dost decline, / Of tracing word by word, and line by line. — 1647 •(no longer used) To walk; to go; to travel.Not wont on foote with heavy armes to trace. — 1596 •(no longer used) To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.We do trace this alley up and down. — 1598 adjective1 •Extremely small or insignificant (of an amount or quantity). formstraced · tracing · traces · traceth · tracest · more trace · most trace · tracest Phrases with trace trace downTo track down trace outTo draw by tracing without a traceWithout showing or leaving behind any sign of something; tracelessly.
