Tracker

How to spell tracker

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tracker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tracker mean?

1. nounA device, app, or system that follows and records movement, location, or progress.
2. nounA person skilled at following the trail or footprints of animals or people.

Tracker in a sentence

• She clipped a fitness tracker to her wrist before the morning run.

• The experienced tracker followed the deer prints through the wet sand.

• The delivery firm gave each parcel a digital tracker so customers could see its location.

• Rescue teams brought in a tracker to find the missing hiker.

Where does tracker come from?

Language of origin: French

The word tracker is built on the noun and verb 'track', which English took in the 1400s from Old French 'trac', meaning a trail or the marks left by something passing. That French term itself probably came from a Germanic source related to words for treading or drawing, since a track is literally the line that feet or wheels draw across the ground. Adding the agent suffix '-er', which marks the thing or person that performs an action, produced 'tracker', someone or something that follows a trail. Originally a tracker was a skilled person who read animal and human footprints in the wild, but the word broadened in the modern era to cover devices and software that follow movement, spending, or progress. The simple spelling rarely traps adults, since the doubled 'ck' before '-er' mirrors many familiar words like locker and sticker.

How the word is built

• track (path, trail)
• -er (agent suffix: one that does)