Tracked

How to spell tracked

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tracked

What does tracked mean?

1. verbFollowed the trail, movement, or progress of someone or something over time.
2. verbLeft a trail of dirt or mud by walking it across a surface.

Tracked in a sentence

• The courier company tracked every parcel from the depot to the front door.

• The children tracked mud across the clean kitchen floor after football practice.

• She tracked her monthly spending in a spreadsheet to find where the money went.

• He tracked wet leaves through the hallway without taking off his boots.

Where does tracked come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the past tense of the verb 'track', which entered English in the late 1400s from the Old French word 'trac', meaning a trail, a track, or the mark left by something passing. The French noun is generally thought to come from a Germanic source related to Dutch 'trek', meaning a pull, a draught, or a journey, the same family that gives us the modern words 'trek' and 'trace'. The earliest English sense was the literal one: the footprints or marks an animal or person leaves behind, which a hunter could follow. From that the verb grew to mean 'to follow a trail', and over time it broadened into today's meanings of monitoring movement, recording progress, and laying rails. The spelling trap lives in the ending: 'tracked' sounds exactly like the unrelated noun 'tract', so the silent-looking '-cked' must be written out in full rather than collapsed into '-ct'.

How the word is built

• track (from Old French trac: a trail or path)
• -ed (past tense suffix)

Words that sound like tracked

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• tract: A large and often continuous area or expanse of land.