Spouse was wondering about the etymology of “record” in English because he’s learning Spanish and apparently it means “remember”.
It turns out that English’s “record” comes from Old French and Latin “remember”.
That’s interesting on its own (a record being a memory is poetic). But then it turns out that the “-cord” part of record comes from the Latin word for “heart”. So I’m guessing that the English phrase “by heart” has much the same origin.
I’ve always liked that playing memorized music on an instrument is called “playing by heart”.