outline vs trace

outline

noun
  • A preliminary plan for a project. 

  • A line marking the boundary of an object figure. 

  • The outer shape of an object or figure. 

  • A prose telling of a story intended to be turned into a screenplay; generally longer and more detailed than a treatment. 

  • A sketch or drawing in which objects are delineated in contours without shading. 

  • A general description of some subject. 

  • A statement summarizing the important points of a text. 

  • A setline or trotline. 

verb
  • To optimize for size by replacing repeated code fragments with function calls. 

  • To draw an outline of. 

  • To summarize. 

trace

noun
  • 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. 

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