Traction

How to spell traction

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce traction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does traction mean?

1. nounThe grip of a tyre, wheel, or shoe on a surface that prevents slipping.
2. nounThe progress, support, or popularity that an idea, product, or campaign begins to gain.
3. nounA sustained pulling force applied to a limb or part of the body to treat an injury.

Traction in a sentence

• The worn tyres lost traction on the icy road.

• The new policy slowly gained traction among voters.

• The patient spent two weeks in traction after breaking his leg.

• Good hiking boots give you traction on loose gravel.

• The startup struggled to get any traction in its first year.

• The surgeon applied gentle traction to realign the fracture.

Where does traction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb trahere, meaning 'to pull' or 'to drag', whose past participle was tractus. From that came the noun tractio, describing the act of pulling. English took the word in by way of French in the seventeenth century, originally with the literal sense of drawing or hauling something along. The same trahere root sits inside a whole family of familiar words, including tractor (a machine that pulls), attract (to pull toward), contract (to draw together), and subtract (to draw away), so spelling the 'tract' chunk consistently across that family is the key memory hook. Over time traction broadened from the bare idea of pulling to the modern senses of grip on a surface and, more recently, the figurative notion of an idea catching on and gaining momentum.

How the word is built

• tract (from Latin tractus, the past participle of trahere: to pull or drag)
• -ion (noun suffix forming an action or result)