trace
/tɹeɪs/
"trace" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“trace” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #5,277 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #5,277
- frequency rank, English
- 5
- letters
- 7
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - An act of tracing.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | trace |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /tɹeɪs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #5,277 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “trace” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for trace is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tɹeɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,277 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for trace, with forms such as "rtace", "tarce", and "tracce". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "tre", "true", "tree", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English trace, traas, from Old French trace (“an outline, track, trace”), from the verb (see below). The correct English form is trace, spelled T-R-A-C-E.
Definition
- 1An act of tracing.
- 2An enquiry sent out for a missing article, such as a letter or an express package.
- 3A mark left as a sign of passage of a person or animal.
- 4A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
- 5A very small amount, often residual, of some substance or material.
- 6A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board.
- 7An informal road or prominent path in an arid area.
- 8One 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.
- 9A 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.
- 10The ground plan of a work or works.
- 11The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.
- 12The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.
- 13An 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.
- 14A sequence of instructions, including branches but not loops, that is executed for some input data.
- 15A signifier approximated in the absence of stable signified.
Etymology
From Middle English trace, traas, from Old French trace (“an outline, track, trace”), from the verb (see below).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: rtace,tarce,tracce,traec,trcae,trrace,ttrace
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of trace - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “trace”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is T-R-A-C-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /tɹeɪs/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “tre” - see the side-by-side comparison. trace vs tre
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.