rekordo

English "record" is three words. Esperanto is not. This is the useful thing about the page and the reason it needs one at all. Split the English word into its jobs and Esperanto gives each a different root.

• The best performance ever achieved in a discipline - rekordo. Only this. ReVo's definition is "the most extreme result compared with all previous ones in the same discipline", and every example it gives is athletic or competitive.
• The gramophone record, the flat black disc - disko at rank 2,148. That page makes the point that disko is anything flat and circular, and the record is one specialisation of it.
• The written entry, the file, the register kept by an office - registro. Company records are registroj, and to record something in writing is registri.
• And to record sound or video is registri, surbendigi (onto tape) or surdiskigi (onto disc), never rekordi, which is not a word.

So the two senses that collide most often - the athlete's and the DJ's - live in two unrelated Esperanto roots, and getting them the wrong way round produces sentences that are not so much wrong as baffling. Mia ŝatata rekordo says my favourite personal best; you meant mia ŝatata disko.

The family, which is small and good. Rekordulo is the record holder, the one who set the current mark. Malrekordo is the wonderful opposite: the worst result anybody has managed, and English has no single word for it at all. You starigi or atingi a record and you rompi or superi somebody else's - break it or surpass it, exactly as in English.

Not only sport. ReVo's own examples run to marathon dancing, the membership figures of an organisation and the loudest noise measured, so rekordo is happy anywhere there is a measurable extreme. Rekorda jaro is a record year; rekorda varmo is record heat. That is a straight borrowing of the English adjectival use, and it has settled in.