guide vs trace

guide

noun
  • A sign that guides people; guidepost. 

  • Someone who guides, especially someone hired to show people around a place or an institution and offer information and explanation, or to lead them through dangerous terrain. 

  • A grooved director for a probe or knife in surgery. 

  • A blade or channel for directing the flow of water to the buckets in a water wheel. 

  • A spirit believed to speak through a medium. 

  • A member of a group marching in formation who sets the pattern of movement or alignment for the rest. 

  • A document or book that offers information or instruction; guidebook. 

  • Any marking or object that catches the eye to provide quick reference. 

verb
  • to serve as a guide for someone or something; to lead or direct in a way; to conduct in a course or path. 

  • to act as a guide. 

  • to exert control or influence over someone or something. 

  • to supervise the education or training of someone. 

  • to steer or navigate, especially a ship or as a pilot. 

trace

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

  • 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. 

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