boilerplate vs trace

boilerplate

noun
  • Syndicated material. 

  • A sheet of copper or steel used in the construction of a boiler. 

  • The rating plate or nameplate required to be affixed to a boiler by the Boiler Explosions Act (1882). 

  • Standard text or program code used routinely and added with a text editor or word processor; text of a legal or official nature added to documents or labels. 

  • Hard, icy snow which may be dangerous to ski on. 

  • Formulaic or hackneyed language. 

  • A plate attached to industrial machinery, identifying information such as manufacturer, model number, serial number, and power requirements. 

verb
  • To store (standard text) so that it can easily be retrieved for reuse. 

adj
  • Describing text or other material of a standard or routine nature. 

  • Used to refer to a non-functional spacecraft used to test configuration and procedures. 

trace

noun
  • A residue of some substance or material. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • An enquiry sent out for a missing article, such as a letter or an express package. 

  • 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. 

  • A mark left as a sign of passage of a person or animal. 

  • An act of tracing. 

  • A very small amount. 

  • 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. 

  • An informal road or prominent path in an arid area. 

  • A current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board. 

verb
  • To follow the execution of the program by making it to stop after every instruction, or by making it print a message after every step. 

  • To draw or sketch lightly or with care. 

  • To follow the trail of. 

  • To follow the history of. 

  • To copy onto a sheet of paper superimposed over the original, by drawing over its lines. 

How often have the words boilerplate and trace occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )