“Off the record” is documented by the mid-19th century, with dated examples appearing around the 1840s. The expression draws on a straightforward sense of “record”: an official account of what was said or done. If a remark was off that record, it was left out of the formal account. That early sense helps explain the phrase, but it does not identify the moment or setting in which someone first said it.
Court proceedings are often credited with giving the phrase its start. The connection is plausible: testimony and other statements might be excluded from a court’s official record. But the available evidence does not establish that a courtroom is where the expression was coined. It is safer to say that the phrase grew from the broader idea of something not entered into an official account. As newspapers developed closer relationships with sources, journalists used it for information given in confidence—information not meant to be published or attributed.
A tidy origin story can make “off the record” sound like a fixed legal rule carried directly into journalism. The history is less certain, and the modern journalistic meaning is less uniform. A source and reporter may agree that a detail can guide reporting but cannot appear in print, or that it can be used only without naming the source. Practices vary, so the terms should be agreed on before the information is shared. The phrase can also mean simply that a comment was informal or unofficial, with no promise of secrecy implied.
In everyday use, someone might say, “Off the record, the committee is considering a different plan,” or, “She shared the figures off the record, so I can’t identify her as the source.” In both cases, the phrase signals a boundary around what may be repeated, though the precise boundary depends on the agreement.
“Off the record” endures because it compresses a complicated negotiation about trust, attribution and disclosure into three familiar words.