Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others. It forms one of the oldest and most common means of sharing (unproven) facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature, as opposed to normal conversation.

Over the last decade, gossip has come to the attention of academia as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit power structures.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.Fact: date=March 2008

Etymology

The word is from Old English godsibb, from god and sibb, the term for godparents, i.e. a child's godfather or godmother. In the 16th century, the word assumed the meaning of a person, mostly a woman, one who delights in idle talk, a newsmonger, a tattler. In the early 19th century, the term was extended from the talker to the conversation of such persons. The verb to gossip, meaning "to be a gossip", first appears in Shakespeare.

One popular etymology (or folk-etymology) connects the word "gossip" with "to sip": the tale tells how politicians would send assistants to bars to sit and listen to general public conversations. The assistants had instructions to sip a beer and listen to opinions; they responded to the command to "go sip", which allegedly turned into "gossip".

Functions of gossip

Gossip can serve to:

• normalise and reinforce moral boundaries in a speech-community
• foster and build a sense of community with shared interests and information
• build structures of social accountability
• further mutual social grooming (like many other uses of language, only more so)
• provide a mating tool that allows (for example) women to mutually identify socially desirable men and compare notes on which men are better than others.
• be used as a form of passive aggression, as a tool to isolate and harm others
• provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information in organizations

Workplace gossip

Peter Vajda identifies gossip as a form of workplace violence, noting that it is "essentially a form of attack."

• Lost productivity and wasted time,
• Erosion of trust and morale,
• Increased anxiety among employees as rumors circulate without any clear information as to what is fact and what isn't,
• Growing divisiveness among employees as people “take sides,"
• Hurt feelings and reputations,
• Jeopardized chances for the gossipers' advancement as they are perceived as unprofessional, and
• Attrition as good employees leave the company due to the unhealthy work atmosphere.