The word was first recorded in English by 1300, from French. An anonymous medieval romance, Kyng Alisaunder, used it to describe the proud heart of a character named Archelaus.
Old French had already used the word by the twelfth century. Behind the French form lay a Vulgar Latin word, the everyday spoken language of the Roman Empire, built using the same ending found in the English word 'age'.
Behind that Vulgar Latin form lay the original Latin word for ‘heart’. That word traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *kerd-, with the same meaning.
CORDIAL and RECORD share the same root, meaning 'heart'. CORDIAL entered English around 1400, from Medieval Latin, originally meaning 'of, or pertaining to, the heart'. RECORD entered English around 1200, from Old French and Latin, originally meaning 'to get by heart'.
By the late fourteenth century the word had come to describe a mental strength, the sense that now dominates. By the sixteenth century, separately, it had also taken on a surprising secondary meaning, describing sexual desire and vigour, a sense entirely lost today.
