Trace

1. a surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the former existence, influence, or action of some agent or event; vestige: traces of an advanced civilization among the ruins. 2. a barely discernible indication or evidence of some quantity, quality, characteristic, expression, etc.: a trace of anger in his tone. 3. an extremely small amount of some chemical component: a trace of copper in its composition. 4. traces, the series of footprints left by an animal. 5. the track left by the passage of a person, animal, or object: the trace of her skates on the ice. 6. Meteorology. precipitation of less than 0.005 inches (0.127 mm). 7. a trail or path, especially through wild or open territory, made by the passage of people, animals, or vehicles. 8. engram. 9. a tracing, drawing, or sketch of something. 10. a lightly drawn line, as the record drawn by a self-registering instrument. 11. Mathematics. the intersection of two planes, or of a plane and a surface. the sum of the elements along the principal diagonal of a square matrix. the geometric locus of an equation. 12. the visible line or lines produced on the screen of a cathode-ray tube by the deflection of the electron beam. 13. Linguistics. (in generative grammar) a construct that is phonologically empty but serves to mark the place in the surface structure of a sentence from which a noun phrase has been moved by a transformational operation. 14. Obsolete. a footprint.