Spoor is a trace or a set of footprints by which the progress of someone or something may be followed. Spoor may include
tracks,
scents, or broken foliage. Spoor is useful for discovering or surveying what types of animals live in an area, or in animal
tracking
Tracking may refer to:
Science and technology Computing
* Tracking, in computer graphics, in match moving (insertion of graphics into footage)
* Tracking, composing music with music tracker software
* Eye tracking, measuring the position of ...
.
The
word originated c. 1823, from
Cape Dutch
Cape Dutch, also commonly known as Cape Afrikaners, were a historic socioeconomic class of Afrikaners who lived in the Western Cape during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The terms have been evoked to describe an affluent, educated sect ...
''spoor'', from
Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or , there was no overarching sta ...
''spor'', which is
cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.
Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...
with
Old English
Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
''spor'' "footprint, track, trace" and modern
English language
English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...
''spurn'' (as in ankle). It is cognate also with
spur
A spur is a metal tool designed to be worn in pairs on the heels of riding boots for the purpose of directing a horse or other animal to move forward or laterally while riding. It is usually used to refine the riding aids (commands) and to ba ...
, the metal tool on the heels of riding boots.
By analogy, in politics, "to look carefully on the spoor in the trails" means to investigate what is actually going on in a sensitive situation.
See also
*
Fewmets
Feces (also known as faeces or fæces; : faex) are the solid or semi-solid remains of food that was not digested in the small intestine, and has been broken down by bacteria in the large intestine. Feces contain a relatively small amount of ...
*
Footprint
Footprints are the impressions or images left behind by a person walking or running. Hoofprints and pawprints are those left by animals with hooves or paws rather than feet, while "shoeprints" is the specific term for prints made by shoes. The ...
*
Trace (deconstruction)
Trace () is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely '' Writing and Difference'' and '' Of Grammatology''.
Overview
In French, the word ''t ...
*
Trace fossil
A trace fossil, also called an ichnofossil (; ), is a fossil record of biological activity by lifeforms, but not the preserved remains of the organism itself. Trace fossils contrast with body fossils, which are the fossilized remains of part ...
(ichnofossil)
Notes
{{Authority control
Afrikaans words and phrases
Wild animals identification
South African English
Political terminology
Footprints