spoor

plural spoors

1. uncountableusuallyThe track, trail, droppings, or scent of an animal.

   Even poor Nobs appeared dejected as we quit the compound and set out upon the well-marked spoor of the abductor.

   1918 September–November, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Land That Time Forgot”, in The Blue Book Magazine, Chicago, Ill.: Story-press Corp., →OCLC; republished as chapter VIII, in Hugo Gernsback, editor, Amazing Stories, (please specify |part=I to III), New York, N.Y.: Experimenter Publishing, 1927, →OCLC

   4 more examples

   We all stopped to examine that monstrous spoor. If it were indeed a bird - and what animal could leave such a mark? - its foot was so much larger than an ostrich's that its height upon the same scale must be enormous.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   Now he has picked up the spoor of drunken vomit and there is the doll sprawled against a wall, his pants streaked with urine.

   1971, William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, page 10

   From the spoor, skilled trackers can deduce an individual's age, sex, physical condition, speed, and fatigue level, as well as the time of day it passed by.

   2016, Joseph Henrich, chapter 5, in The Secret of Our Success […] , Princeton: Princeton University Press, →ISBN

   Which was good. If she kept her superego occupied with minor considerations, the lizard brain could keep planning routes and obscuring caches and examining half-melted human candles for the Markey equivalent of spoor without interference. She didn't want her emotional intelligence and creativity to be paying close attention when she found Michael Nass half-fused to a cave wall, drooling pink slime into the dust and talking portentous nonsense about Norte Chico burial rituals while his jellified skin sloughed off, considering whose fault it had been that he'd been at AAF-D when the sinners came marching in.

   2023 October 10, HarryBlank, “The Cruelest Fight”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 31 Aug 2024

present singular third person spoors · participle present spooring · participle past spoored · past spoored

1. transitiveTo track (an animal) by following its spoor.

plural Spoors

1. An occupational surname from Middle English

   Synonyms: Spaw, Spoore, Spoores, Spoors, Spor, Spore, Spores, Spors