tracto

Tracto is a term used in Spanish and Portuguese to denote a system of connected organs or a passage within a living body. It comes from the Latin tractus, meaning a drawing out or route, and in medical usage designates a continuous anatomical pathway that links constituent structures. The most common uses describe what English speakers call a tract: the digestive tract, the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, and related systems.

Typical compounds include tracto digestivo (digestive tract), tracto gastrointestinal (gastrointestinal tract), tracto urinario (urinary tract), and tracto respiratorio (respiratory tract). In phonetics and speech science, tracto vocal refers to the vocal tract, the series of cavities involved in shaping speech sounds. In neuroanatomy, tracto nervioso is used to denote nerve tracts, the white-matter pathways that connect brain regions.

Outside pure anatomy, tracto remains a technical noun in medical and scientific contexts. In English, the direct cognate tract is used for many of the same concepts. The term is primarily found in technical writing and clinical discourse rather than in general, everyday language.