means A formal account that gathers facts, findings, or events into an organized statement, written or spoken, for someone who needs to know.

from From the Latin reportare, "to carry back" — re- (back) plus portare (to carry), the same portare that gives us porter, portable, and transport. A report was literally something you carried back: news brought home from the field, the frontier, the meeting. The word arrived in English through Old French reporter, and the sense of carrying information eventually solidified into the tidy documents we now dread.