Definition of "trace"

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

[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

I feel thy power […] to trace the ways / Of highest agents.

1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […]; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873,

Happy the mortal, who has traced effects To their first cause

c. 1792, William Cowper, On a Similar Occasion for the Year 1792

You may trace the deluge quite round the globe.

1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth

They traced the ancient lineages of two species to reveal the insects' lengthy history of asexual reproduction.

2011 July 19, Ella Davies, “Sticks insects survive one million years without sex”, in BBC‎

That servile path thou nobly dost decline, / Of tracing word by word, and line by line.

1647, John Denham, To Sir Richard Fanshaw

Not wont on foote with heavy armes to trace.

1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto III”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, stanza 29

We do trace this alley up and down.

1598–1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “Much Adoe about Nothing”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene i]