Track down means to find a person or thing after a long search. People use it about an old friend, a rare book, a cheap ticket or the cause of a fault. The verb suggests persistence: you had to work for it.
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track down + person/thing; track him/it down; finally/manage to track down
- It took me three weeks to track down a cheap flight to Tokyo.
- The engineers finally tracked down the bug that kept crashing the app.
- I'm trying to track down an old photo of our first office.
What changed
First versionI lost my friend's number, but I finally tracked down him on social media.
RevisionI lost my friend's number, but I finally tracked him down on social media.
When the object is a pronoun, it goes between track and down: tracked him down. A noun can also come after down: tracked down my old friend. Tracked down him is a typical mistake; a native speaker wouldn't say it.
Look for means to search, the process itself; track down means to find in the end: I looked for the book for weeks and finally tracked it down online. Find simply means to find, with no hint of a long search: I found my keys in my bag.
Your turn
After months of emails and phone calls, we finally ___ my grandfather's old friend in Canada.
Show the answer
tracked down — Months of emails and calls, plus the word finally, point to a result: the friend was found, so tracked down. Looked for describes the search, not the discovery, and doesn't go with finally after such a long effort.
Describe how you searched for a rare item or a person. Say how long the search took and where you finally found what you were looking for.
After two months of searching, I tracked down my favourite childhood book in a small second-hand shop in Kazan.
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