Tractate comes from Latin tractātus ('a handling, treatise'), from tractāre ('to handle, treat'), frequentative of trahere ('to draw, pull'). The historical chain includes Latin tractātus, Latin tractāre, and Latin trahere. The quoted older senses, "a handling, treatise", "to handle, treat", and "to draw, pull", supply the semantic anchors for tractate. The formation is best read as borrowed: the word tractate carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a noun, "a treatise or formal written essay on a subject". Related English forms include tract, treatise, and tractable. The result is a noun whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.