trackless

English

WOTD – 14 September 2025

Etymology

From track (noun) +‎ -less (suffix meaning ‘lacking or without something’).[1]

Pronunciation

Adjective

trackless

  1. Of a place: not having tracks or paths; pathless, untrodden; also, having had all tracks removed.
    a trackless desert    a trackless forest
    • 1836, Joanna Baillie, “The Bride: A Drama. In Three Acts.”, in Dramas, […], volume III, London: […] Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, […], →OCLC, Act I, scene ii, page 296:
      Associates! Solitude in trackless deserts, / Where locusts, ants, and lizards poorly thrive,— / […] / Were to an honest heart endurable, / Rather than such associates.
    • 1954 February, Trevor Holloway, “Canada’s Transcontinental Routes”, in The Railway Magazine, London: Tothill Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 127:
      In a country so vast as Canada, nothing but the railway could possibly save it from remaining a trackless, undeveloped wilderness.
    • 1987 September 16, Toni Morrison, Beloved […], New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, published October 1987, →ISBN, page 165:
      "You got two feet, Sethe, not four," he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.
    • 2015 October, Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy, New York, N.Y.: Orbit Books, →ISBN, page 233:
      At about this point, Seivarden and her two Amaats had made it into a cramped and dim access corridor behind the governor's residence. It had probably at one point been meant for servants to use to go unobtrusively back and forth, but hadn't been used in years; the floor was dusty and trackless.
    • 2021 November 3, Joseph Brennan, “Boxes with functions across the centuries”, in Rail, number 943, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire: Bauer Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 59:
      The two structures remain in a remarkable state of preservation, despite finding themselves adrift and trackless in the County Down countryside, after the closure of the station and the line in the 1950s.
  2. (literary) Leaving no track or trace when moving; also, not following any track or path.
    • 1853, Eliza Cook, “The Waters”, in The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook. […], new edition, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Locken, […], pages 97–98:
      What was it that I loved so well about my childhood's home? / It was the wide and wave-lashed shore, the black rocks crowned with foam! / It was the sea-gull's flapping wing, all trackless in its flight, / Its screaming note, that welcomed on the fierce and stormy night!
  4. (rail transport, road transport) Of a train, tram, etc.: not running on tracks.
    Synonym: railless
    a trackless trolley

Derived terms

Translations

References

  1. ^ “trackless, adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2024; “trackless, adj.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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