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.
- (fortification) 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.
- (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.
Synonyms: track, trail
Pronunciation
About this word
Trace is a 1-meaning word in English. Medium-length words often have several interesting anagrams.
This page shows the definition of trace along with every other word you can make from its letters. Click the link above to see all anagrams and shorter words formed from the same set of letters.
How to use this page
Every word in our dictionary has its own page like this one. Here you can:
- Read the definition — see what the word means, how it is used in context, and which part of speech it belongs to.
- Hear the pronunciation — when an audio recording is available, press the play button to hear the word spoken aloud.
- Browse synonyms — see related words that share a similar meaning, useful for expanding your vocabulary.
- Find anagrams — click "Other words from trace's letters" to see every word you can spell using the same letters.
Words in word games
If you are playing a word game, knowing whether a word is valid is essential. Trace appears in our 370,000-word English dictionary, which includes most words accepted in Scrabble and Words With Friends. However, always check the official word list for the specific game you are playing, as different games use different dictionaries.
Scrabble
In Scrabble, the valid word lists are the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OTCWL/NWL) for North America and the Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) for international play. Our dictionary covers most words in both lists, but some proper nouns, abbreviations, and offensive terms may differ.
Wordle
Wordle uses its own curated word list that is smaller than the full Scrabble dictionary. If Trace appears here, it may or may not be a valid Wordle answer — but it is a real English word regardless.
Try it interactively
Open Trace in the interactive unscrambler →
More word resources
Explore our guides for more word game help:
Or see all our guides on the blog index.