0 past simple and past participle of trace
1 to find someone or something that was lost:
The police are trying to trace the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned outside a hospital.
Attempts to trace the whereabouts of a man seen leaving the scene of the crime have so far been unsuccessful.
Their missing daughter was finally traced to (= found in) Manchester.
The outbreak of food poisoning was traced to some contaminated shellfish.
She has traced her family history back to the seventeenth century.
The practice of giving eggs at Easter can be traced back to (= first happened in) festivals in ancient China.
The film traces the events leading up to the Russian Revolution in 1917.
2 to copy a drawing or pattern, etc. by drawing over its lines through a thin piece of transparent paper:
The new system can trace a phone call in a fraction of a second.
Police are trying to trace a man in connection with the murder.
The growth of the economy is traced over time, taking into account population growth, capital accumulation, and technical change.
For many years, these deficiencies were understandable as they were traced to the extended absence of viable models of personality in the field of psychology.
The source of the outbreak was traced to an untreated private water supply.
