Gossip or rumors, especially the kind shared casually between people; the word originally referred to water barrels on ships.
From nautical slang: 'scuttle' (a hole in a ship's hull or a barrel) + 'butt' (a barrel or cask). Sailors would gather around the water barrel ('scuttlebutt') to gossip, so the word came to mean gossip itself. It entered common English in the early 1900s.
Isn't it wild that the word for gossip comes from sailors hanging around a water barrel? The water barrel was basically the office watercooler of the 1800s — where people actually gathered in real life to swap stories and rumors!
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