It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 14th.
Today's word is scuttlebutt, spelled S-C-U-T-T-L-E-B-U-T-T.
Scuttlebutt is a noun.
It refers to rumor or gossip.
In other words, talk or stories about someone or something that may not be true.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Minnesota Star Tribune.
When office workers catch up on the latest scuttlebutt around the water cooler,
they are continuing a longstanding tradition that probably also occurred on sailing ships of yore.
Back in the early 1800s, the word scuttlebutt, an alteration of scuttled butt,
referred to a cask containing a ship's daily supply of fresh water.
Scuttle means to cut a hole through the bottom, and butt means cask.
That name was later applied to a drinking fountain on a ship or at a naval installation.
In time,
the term for the water source was also applied to the gossip and rumors disseminated around it,
and the latest chatter has been called scuttlebutt ever since.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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