Gossip is idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others.

While gossip forms one of the oldest and most common means of spreading and sharing facts and views, it also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature. Compare conversation.

Some people commonly understand gossip as meaning 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

Gossip has recently 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. (Compare discourse.)Fact: date=March 2008

Researchers studying computer networks and distributed computing have recently begun to develop software based on what they term gossip protocols. These mimic social networks as a way to carry out distributed computing tasks that can be hard to solve in other ways. (The term epidemic protocol is also used in this context.)Fact: date=March 2008

Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary records the use of gossip in the meaning of "idle talk; trifling or groundless rumour; tittle-tattle ... 1asy, unrestrained talk or writing, esp. about persons or social incidents" back as far as 1811. This became a primary meaning of the word, although literary as well as everyday English can continue to use gossip in the sense of "talkative woman" (apparently a near-synonym with "godparent" in Early Modern English, the first attestation of the extended meaning of "anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk" dating from 1566). The verb to gossip dates to the early 17th century.Fact: date=June 2008

Discredited folk-etymology

Despite the academic etymology, 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
• entertain and divert participants in gossip-sessions
• retail and develop various types of story — anecdotes, narratives and even legends — see memetics
• 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.
• it is 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.