Record is (as a noun) any set of data kept, and (as a verb) to set down data to be kept. Such data may be writing, audio, digital, or other media.
For the sound recording type of record that spins on a turntable, known as a phonograph record in American English and a gramophone record in British English, see analogue disc record.
In computer science, a record can be any of at least two different things.
The most common meaning is simply "an item in a database". There is a wide variety of such "records", but the most common type (the one relational databases support) is an instance of the other kind of record.
The other meaning of "record" is "an aggregation of several items of possibly different types", with the implication that there are many records containing the same types of items. C calls these "structs"; object-oriented languages often keep their records hidden inside "objects", or "class instances"; languages in the ML family have their tuples. COBOL was the first programming language to support records directly; Algol got it from COBOL, and Pascal got it, more or less indirectly, from Algol.
A record is also an extreme value that would be considered worthy of recording for posterity, e.g. in sports, weather, economics, etc. See world record for more examples.
In law, the record of a court case or administrative agency adjudication normally consists of the transcript or minutes of the proceedings, any exhibits introduced in evidence at the hearing or trial, and any motion papers filed in the case. When an appeal is taken, the appellate court reviews the decision of the trial court based on the record on appeal which consists of the record of the case from the trial court or some subset of that record. Where the original record is missing, a hearing may have to be held to reconstruct the record on appeal. Nowadays, this is rare, but was common in past centuries before stenographic equipment came into use, when transcripts of trials were not always made. (See also court of record.)
