traceability

UK/ˌtɹeɪsəˈbɪlɪti/US/ˌtɹeɪsəˈbɪlɪti/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — trace sits at #1,567Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Traceability is being able to track where every part came from. Full traceability, traceability records, batch traceability.

It is a legal requirement in food and in medicine, since a recall depends on knowing which batch went where. In manufacturing it is what turns one faulty component into a recall of a hundred rather than a hundred thousand.

Definitions of traceability

1nountraceabilityBeing able to track where every part came from.C1
“Full traceability means the shop can tell you exactly which farm your beef came from.”

traceability is a quality.

Where it comes from

From traceable plus -ity, from trace, from Old French tracier, to make a way.

Old French
trace — an outline, track, trace
Middle English
trace
English
trace
English, today
traceability

From trace + -ability, also analyzable as traceable + -ity. trace comes from Middle English trace, traas, from Old French trace (“an outline, track, trace”), from the verb (see below).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Factory & Manufacturing

Practise this word

traceability in the wild

To ease the creation of traceability matrices, it is advisable to add the relationships to the source documents for both backward and forward traceability.
Traceability matrix
The traceability of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) describes a system that ensures the forwarding of the identity of a GMO from its production to its final buyer.
Traceability of genetically modified organisms
Requirements traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering.
Requirements traceability
However, traceability may document relationships between many kinds of development artifacts, such as requirements, specification statements, designs, tests, models and developed components.
Requirements traceability
Reverse semantic traceability (RST) is a quality control method for verification improvement.
Reverse semantic traceability

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the trace family

trace

traceability — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

untraceable

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