martyr: [OE] Etymologically, a martyr is a ‘witness’ – that was the original meaning of Greek mártur, which came ultimately from Indo-European *mer ‘remember’ (source of English memory, mourn, remember, etc). In Christian usage, the notion of someone dying as a ‘witness’ to their faith led to the application of mártur to ‘martyr’, and it was in this sense that it passed via Latin martyr into Old English. => memory, mourn, remember
