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Summary: This paper studies the problem of global practical tracking by output feedback for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with unmeasured state‐dependent growth and unknown time‐varying control coefficients. Compared with the closely related works, the remarkableness of this paper is that the upper and lower bounds of unknown control coefficients are not required to be known a priori. Motivated by our recent works, by combining the methods of universal control and deadzone with the backstepping technique and skillfully constructing a novel Lyapunov function, we propose a new adaptive tracking control scheme with appropriate design parameters. The new scheme guarantees that the state of the resulting closed‐loop system is globally bounded while the tracking error converges to a prescribed arbitrarily small neighborhood of the origin after a finite time. Two examples, including a practical example, are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]