Even Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-day mailing list gives no quarter:

The Word of the Day for September 11 is:

commemorate \kuh-MEH-muh-rayt\ (verb)
1 : to call to remembrance
*2 a : to mark by some ceremony or observation : observe
b : to serve as a memorial of

Example sentence:
The children in Mrs. Clark’s sixth-grade class have made a memorial quilt to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001.

Did you know?
When you remember something, you are mindful of it. It’s appropriate, therefore, that “commemorate” and other related memory-associated words (including “memorable,” “memorial,”, “remember,” and “memory” itself) come from the Latin root “memor,” meaning “mindful.” Some distant older relatives are Old English “gemimor” (“well-known”), Greek “mermera” (“care”), and Sanskrit “smarati” (“he remembers”). English speakers have been marking the memory of important events with “commemorate” since the late 16th century.