Motorsport

The last entry is le record du tour, and the word that closes it is a French word that emigrated, worked abroad for six centuries and came home with a different trade. Old French had the verb recorder, from the Latin recordari, to call something back to mind, and beside it a noun for a thing remembered, a testimony. Both crossed the Channel with the Normans. English kept them, hardened the noun into whatever is set down for later, and in the nineteenth century began applying it to the best performance a sport had on paper. At that point French borrowed its own word back, and only in that one sense. Le record today is a sporting best and nothing else. Every other job belongs to a different word: enregistrer for putting sound on tape, le registre for the bound book, le dossier for a file, les antécédents for what a person did before. So battre le record du tour is safe, while « a medical record » is never un record.