touch vs trace

touch

noun
  • A little bit; a small amount. 

  • The ability to perform a task well; aptitude. 

  • The children's game of tag. 

  • A set of changes less than the total possible on seven bells, i.e. less than 5,040. 

  • An act of borrowing or stealing something. 

  • The part of a sports field beyond the touchlines or goal-lines. 

  • The faculty or sense of perception by physical contact. 

  • A distinguishing feature or characteristic. 

  • A single stroke on a drawing or a picture. 

  • The broadest part of a plank worked top and but, or of one worked anchor-stock fashion (that is, tapered from the middle to both ends); also, the angles of the stern timbers at the counters. 

  • The style or technique with which one plays a musical instrument. 

  • A disposal of the ball during a game, i.e. a kick or a handball. 

  • An act of touching, especially with the hand or finger. 

  • The particular or characteristic mode of action, or the resistance of the keys of an instrument to the fingers. 

  • A relationship of close communication or understanding. 

  • Form; standard of performance. 

verb
  • To make intimate physical contact with a person. 

  • To cause to be briefly in contact with something. 

  • To deal with in speech or writing; briefly to speak or write (on or upon something). 

  • To make physical contact with; to bring the hand, finger or other part of the body into contact with. 

  • To perform, as a tune; to play. 

  • To be brought, as a sail, so close to the wind that its weather leech shakes. 

  • To strike; to manipulate; to play on. 

  • To come into physical contact, or to be in physical contact. 

  • To come into (involuntary) contact with; to meet or intersect. 

  • To concern, to have to do with. 

  • To make physical contact with a thing. 

  • To lay hands on (someone suffering from scrofula) as a form of cure, as formerly practised by English and French monarchs. 

  • To mark or delineate with touches; to add a slight stroke to with the pencil or brush. 

  • To imbue or endow with a specific quality. 

  • To influence by impulse; to impel forcibly. 

  • To bring (a sail) so close to the wind that its weather leech shakes. 

  • To physically disturb; to interfere with, molest, or attempt to harm through contact. 

  • To try; to prove, as with a touchstone. 

  • To give royal assent to by touching it with the sceptre. 

  • To be on the level of; to approach in excellence or quality. 

  • Of a ship or its passengers: to land, to make a short stop (at). 

  • To physically affect in specific ways implied by context. 

  • To consume, or otherwise use. 

  • To sexually excite with the fingers; to finger or masturbate. 

  • To keep the ship as near (the wind) as possible. 

  • To affect emotionally; to bring about tender or painful feelings in. 

  • To mark (a file or document) as having been modified. 

  • To obtain money from, usually by borrowing (from a friend). 

  • To disturb the mental functions of; to make somewhat insane; often followed with "in the head". 

  • To come close to; to approach. 

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