trace

Etymology 1

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

noun

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.
4. A residue of some substance or material.
   There are traces of chocolate around your lips.
5. A very small amount.
   All of our chocolates may contain traces of nuts.
   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. 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 7, in The China Governess
6. (electronics) 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. (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.
10. (fortification) The ground plan of a work or works.
11. (geometry) The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
12. (mathematics) The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
13. (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. 1999, Georges Rebuschi, Laurice Tuller, The Grammar of Focus, page 290
14. (programming) A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data.

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.

verb

1. (transitive) To follow the trail of.
   Happy the mortal, who has traced effects To their first cause c. 1792, William Cowper, On a Similar Occasion for the Year 1792
2. To follow the history of.
   1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth You may trace the deluge quite round the globe.
   They traced the ancient lineages of two species to reveal the insects' lengthy history of asexual reproduction. July 19, 2011, 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. (transitive, obsolete) 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.
7. (transitive, obsolete) To walk over; to pass through; to traverse.
8. (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.