A recording is something captured and saved so it can be experienced again later. When you make a recording of your voice, a camera records a video of your birthday party, or a musician records a song in a studio, you're preserving that moment in a form that can be played back whenever you want.

Before recording technology existed, if you wanted to hear a symphony orchestra, you had to attend a live performance. Once musicians could make recordings, people could listen to the same performance over and over. Thomas Edison invented the first practical recording device, the phonograph, in 1877. Today we record everything from phone calls to concerts to home movies, usually as digital files that live on our devices.

The word also means the act of capturing something: you might be recording a video for a school project right now, or a scientist might be recording data from an experiment. Police officers often have body cameras that are constantly recording what happens during their shift.

When someone says “this is on the record” or “off the record,” they're using record as a metaphor for whether something can be officially remembered and repeated. A criminal record is like a recording of someone's past crimes. Your permanent record at school is a file that records your grades and behavior over time, following you from grade to grade.