Trail

How to spell trail

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trail

What does trail mean?

1. nounA rough path through countryside, or the marks and scent left by someone or something that has passed.
2. verbTo drag along behind, to follow at a distance, or to be losing in a contest.

Trail in a sentence

• noun

  The hikers followed the mountain trail until dusk.

• verb

  The players began to trail by two goals in the second half.

• noun

  The dog picked up the scent trail within minutes.

• verb

  Reporters tend to trail the candidate from one event to the next.

Where does trail come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French traillier, meaning 'to tow' or 'to drag along the ground'. Behind the French lies a Latin source, generally traced to tragula, a kind of dragnet or sledge, itself related to trahere, meaning 'to pull' or 'to draw'. The earliest English sense was very physical: something that drags behind, such as a hunting hound following a scent or a robe sweeping the floor. From the idea of something dragged along came the noun sense of the mark or track left behind, and then the modern meaning of a beaten path through countryside. That same Latin trahere also gives us 'tractor', 'attract' and 'trace', which is a useful clue that trail is fundamentally about pulling and leaving a line behind, and the plain 'ai' spelling has stayed stable since the word settled into English.

How the word is built

• trail (a single root from Old French trailler/Latin tragulare: to drag); no prefix or suffix