Other forms: recollections
A recollection is a memory as you hold it now — the thing you remember, not the act of remembering it. Someone asks what your first school was like, and what comes back is a recollection: a corridor smell, a teacher's voice, one cold morning waiting at the gate.
A recollection is personal, and English treats it as something that might be shaky: a hazy recollection, a vague recollection, no recollection at all. The phrase to learn is to the best of my recollection, which witnesses and lawyers use to mean this is what I remember and I could be wrong. Behind the noun is the verb recollect, to bring a memory back on purpose, by digging for it. Recollection names that digging too: after a moment's recollection, he gave us the date. It is a step more formal than memory — you write recollection in a statement and say memory to a friend.
1nounrecollectionSomething you remember; a memory of a past event as you hold it now.
“My only recollection of the house is a red door and a cold hallway.”
synonyms: memory, remembrance
2nounactThe act of bringing something back to mind.
“After a moment's recollection, she gave us the address.”
recollection is a memory.
The Latin verb colligere meant to gather, and recolligere meant to gather again. That came through Latin recollectus and French récollection into English, so a recollection is scattered pieces of the past picked up a second time. The same colligere sits inside collect.
Proto-Indo-European
*leǵ-
Latin
recollectus
French
récollection
English, today
recollection
Built from
Via French récollection or the verb recollect, both from Latin recollectus, the past participle of recolligere (“to collect again”), itself from re- + colligere (“to gather”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA