English speakers use gossip for two things that feel related: the talk itself, and the person who carries it. The talk is informal news about other people's private lives, often unkind or unverified. The person is someone known for passing that news along. In journalism the same noun names a whole beat, from nineteenth-century newspaper columns to celebrity blogs. None of that is the oldest load the word has carried. The origin of the word gossip sits in a baptismal household, not in a rumor mill.
Related in God
Gossip is a native English word, not a loan from French or Latin. In Old English the form was godsibb, a compound of god and sibb. A godsibb was a sponsor at baptism: a godfather or godmother. The compound is literal. Sibb already meant a relative, or kinship itself. Adding god marked a second kind of tie. The sponsor was kin to the child, and to the parents and the other sponsors, not by blood but through the rite. The bond was spiritual affinity, a social and legal relationship in a Christian community.
The noun is recorded in late Old English. Historical dictionaries place it before the twelfth century, with at least one citation from 1014. Parallel compounds appear in related Germanic languages, among them Old Norse guðsifja and Old Saxon guþziff. English did not import the idea from those neighbors so much as share a common pattern: God plus kin.
The second half of the compound
Sibb is the more revealing half for anyone tracing roots. Old English used it as noun and adjective. It covered blood relationship, and also the peace and concord that kinship was supposed to keep. Reconstructed Proto-Germanic forms give *sibjō for kinship and *sibjaz for related. Behind those sits a Proto-Indo-European root often given as *sebʰ- or *swebʰ-, the idea of one's own. Cognates are easy to name once that is on the table. German Sippe still means clan or kin-group. Dutch has sibbe. Icelandic sifjar names in-laws. Latin suus, one's own, is a more distant relative of the same stock. Modern English sibling is the old sib plus the suffix -ling, a formation that originally meant someone of one's kin.
The first half, god, is the ordinary Old English word for the Christian God, the same element that later built godfather and godmother. Those compounds kept the baptismal meaning in plain view. Gossip hid it by changing shape.
How the form thinned
Middle English spellings wander: godsib, gossib, gossippe, gossep, and many others. The d in the cluster gods- dropped, a common kind of simplification, and the second syllable settled toward the modern vowel. By the time the spelling gossip became usual, the word no longer advertised its two parts. A learned revival godsib still exists for the old sponsor sense, a doublet that never went through the same erosion.
Friend, then guest at a birth
Because a godsibb stood in a close, non-blood relationship to a family, the word widened. In Middle English, around the fourteenth century, it could mean a familiar acquaintance, a friend, a neighbor. That step is the hinge of the later story. Sources differ slightly on the first date: some put the friend sense near 1300, others later in the same century. They agree on the direction.
The word then specialized in a social scene that English no longer has in the same form. Childbirth was a gathering of women. Relatives, neighbors, and friends came to the lying-in. Those companions were called gossips. They were not only midwives, and they were not only official godparents, though both might be in the room. Early modern writers still use the word for a sponsor at a christening and as a friendly form of address. Shakespeare can hail a neighbor with it, and he can use the plural for the people who would stand at a baptism.
Talk that outlived the room
From the companion in the room came the chatterer. By the 1560s English could use gossip for anyone given to familiar or idle talk. One early related form, gossip-like, is dated to 1566. The usual historical explanation is practical rather than mysterious: a house full of women waiting through labor talked, and the name of the company stuck to the talker. That link is an inference from custom, not a single documented leap, and it should be stated as such.
The verb followed in the early seventeenth century, around 1627, meaning to talk idly about other people's affairs. The noun for the talk itself is later still, recorded by 1811 for trifling talk and groundless rumor. Over the nineteenth century the tone hardened. Gossip column is in print by 1859. The older godparent sense did not vanish at once; British and historical usage can still mean a sponsor. What faded was the everyday sense of crony or intimate.
The later stereotype that a gossip is typically a woman is not in the Old English word, which named sponsors of either sex. It tracks the early modern birth-room sense, where the company was female, and it stayed in the language after the custom changed.
A matching path in French
French walked a similar road with different roots. Commère comes from Christian Latin commater, co- plus mother, a godmother in relation to the parents and the godfather. It became a familiar female friend, then a woman who talks about other people's lives. The talk is commérage. Compère, the matching word for a godfather, kept the sense of pal and did not pick up the same slur. The parallel is useful because it shows the English change is not a freak of one language. A title for someone close enough to stand at a font, or to sit through a labor, is a short step from a title for someone who knows the family's business.
The takeaway is dated and small. Before it named rumor, the word named a person related in God. The rumor sense of the noun is only about two centuries old. The baptismal sense is a thousand years older.