Other forms: remembered, remembers, remembering
Remember is keeping something in your mind and bringing it back later. A teacher's face, the smell of your grandmother's kitchen, where you left the keys.
Two patterns split the meaning, and this is where learners slip. Remember to lock the door means do not forget to do it — the job is still ahead of you. Remember locking the door means the picture of doing it is already in your head — the job is done. Remember also works on its own: if I remember rightly, it was a Tuesday. A country remembers its dead every November, which is why the day is called Remembrance. The noun is memory, never a remember.
1verbrememberTo keep something in your mind and bring it back later.~82%
“I still remember the smell of that kitchen.”
2verbforgetTo not forget to do something.~2%
“Remember to switch the oven off before you leave.”
3verbhonourTo honour the memory of someone, especially the dead.~16%
“The town remembers its war dead on the second Sunday of November.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: recall
Remember has a re- buried inside it. Latin rememorari meant to remember again, built on memor, mindful; Old French turned it into remembrer and Middle English into remembren. Behind all of them sits the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)mer-, which meant to think about, to be mindful, to remember. Four thousand years, and the idea has not moved.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)mer-
Proto-Indo-European
*mer-
Latin
rememorari — to remember again
Old French
remembrer — to remember
Middle English
remembren
English, today
remember
Built from
From Middle English remembren, from Old French remembrer (“to remember”), from Latin rememorari (“to remember again”), from re- + memor (“mindful”), from Proto-Indo-European mer-, (s)mer- (“to think about, be mindful, remember”). Cognate with Old English mimorian, mymerian (“to remember, commemorate”), Old English māmorian (“to deliberate, plan out, design”). More at mimmer and mammer. Compare also dialectical English umbethink. 2 The success of the Old French word was helped by its proximity in sound and meaning to an existing Germanic word: Old English mimorian, mymerian (“to remember, commemorate”) from Proto-Germanic mimrōną, mīmrōną (“to remember, be mindful”), from the same Indo-European source, and is akin to stq miemerje (“to ponder, reflect”), Middle Low German mimeren (“to ponder, meditate”), Middle Dutch mimeren (“to reflect, think to oneself”) (Dutch mijmeren (“to muse, reflect deeply”)), Old English ġemimor (“mindful”), Old Norse Mímir, Mim (“Norse god of memory”), Old English māmrian (“to think out, design”). Related to mourn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA