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 élitecommunities.[citation needed][dubious – discuss] members of certain


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.)[citation needed]


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.)