Recording

How to spell recording

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recording

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recording mean?

1. nounA piece of sound or video that has been captured and stored for later playback.
2. verbIn the act of capturing sound, images, or information for storage or reference.

Recording in a sentence

• noun

  The lawyer played the recording of the phone call in court.

• verb

  He is recording the lecture so he can review it later.

• noun

  A poor recording of the concert circulated online the next morning.

• verb

  The camera was recording the entire meeting without anyone noticing.

Where does recording come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb 'record' came into English in the 1300s through Old French 'recorder', which descended from the Latin 'recordari', meaning 'to call to mind' or 'to remember'. That Latin verb was built from 're-' (back, again) and 'cor', meaning 'heart', because the heart was once regarded as the seat of memory; to record something was literally to bring it back through the heart. The earliest English senses were about committing facts to memory or setting them down in writing as a permanent account. Only with the rise of mechanical and then electronic capture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did 'record' and its participle 'recording' take on the now-dominant sense of preserving sound or images. The same 'cor' root sits inside everyday words such as 'courage' and 'cordial', and remembering that buried 'cord' (not 'chord') helps keep the spelling steady.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• cord (heart, from Latin cor)
• -ing (noun/verb suffix)