dot vs trace

dot

noun
  • Anything small and like a speck comparatively; a small portion or specimen. 

  • A symbol used for separating the fractional part of a decimal number from the whole part, for indicating multiplication or a scalar product, or for various other purposes. 

  • A small, round spot. 

  • buckshot, projectile from a "dotty" or shotgun 

  • A dot ball. 

  • One of the two symbols used in Morse code. 

  • A punctuation mark used to indicate the end of a sentence or an abbreviated part of a word; a full stop; a period. 

  • A point used as a diacritical mark above or below various letters of the Latin script, as in Ȧ, Ạ, Ḅ, Ḃ, Ċ. 

  • A dowry. 

verb
  • To punch (a person). 

  • To mark or diversify with small detached objects. 

  • To cover with small spots (of some liquid). 

  • To add a dot (the symbol) or dots to. 

  • To mark by means of dots or small spots. 

prep
  • Dot product of the previous vector and the following vector. 

trace

noun
  • A very small amount. 

  • 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. 

  • A residue of some substance or material. 

  • 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. 

  • 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 dot and trace occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )