What the word does now
In current English, gush is a verb of overflow. Water gushes from a cracked pipe. Blood gushes from a wound. Oil gushes from a well. In each case the liquid does not seep; it comes out fast and in volume. The same verb also describes speech that spills praise or feeling so freely that it can sound staged: visitors gush over a newborn, a reviewer gushes about a film. The noun follows the verb. A gush is a sudden outpouring of liquid, and also an extravagant display of sentiment. The two uses share a picture of something that will not stay inside its channel.
A late medieval verb
The origin of the word gush is easiest to pin to late Middle English, not to Old English. Around 1400 the verb appears as gushen, guschen, goshen, and similar spellings. Early contexts are physical and often violent: water forcing its way through vaults, blood and entrails rushing out of a body. The alliterative Morte Arthure, whose language belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, is among the first texts to show the liquid sense clearly. Another alliterative poem, the Destruction of Troy, uses a related form for river water washing through a city. Standard dictionaries therefore date the English verb to the late fourteenth or fifteenth century.
No Old English ancestor is on record. That absence is part of the evidence. A common native verb of pouring would usually leave a trace in the earlier language. Gush looks instead like a form that English either coined or borrowed near the end of the Middle Ages.
The Middle English Dictionary notes a possible earlier use of gosshien for noises in the belly, perhaps before 1200, but it marks that link with a query. Stomach rumbling may not be the same verb at all, and it should not be treated as a proven first step.
Three explanations, none of them closed
How the medieval verb was formed is still argued.
The explanation favored by the Oxford English Dictionary, and by several later desk dictionaries, is that gush is imitative. Speakers built a verb that sounds like a rush of liquid. On this view the word is a Middle English sound-formation, not a borrowing. It sits near other English words whose consonants suggest sudden motion, notably gust and rush. The case for imitation is helped by the lack of a matching verb in Old English and by the claim that a tidy cognate set in the early Germanic languages is missing.
A second explanation looks to Scandinavia. American Heritage allows a possible Norse source and connects the family to an Indo-European root meaning to pour. Old Norse had gusa, to spurt, and related verbs gjósa and geysa. Modern Icelandic keeps gusa. If that path is real, English gush would be a northern borrowing or a form reshaped on a Norse model. It would also stand near geyser, which English took in the eighteenth century from the Icelandic spring-name Geysir, a gusher in the landscape of Haukadalur.
A third comparison runs through the Low Countries and Germany. Middle Dutch guysen described liquid flowing out with a gurgling sound. Later Dutch has gudsen or gutsen. German gießen means to pour. Older etymological dictionaries also mention Low German. Further back on this Germanic line sits Old English geotan, a verb of pouring that survived in dialect as yote. Those forms, if they belong with gush at all, would make it a cousin of a wide pour-family rather than a one-off sound-word.
The three accounts overlap in atmosphere—pouring, spouting, noise—but they do not agree on the immediate parent. Oxford lexicographers have called a direct derivation from Old Norse phonologically untenable. Other reference works still print the Scandinavian and Dutch comparisons. The cautious conclusion is that English acquired a late medieval verb of forceful flow whose source is uncertain: perhaps coined for its sound, perhaps borrowed, perhaps both in a North Sea world where those options were not far apart.
The word itself is morphologically plain. It is not a prefix plus a bound root. The noun was drawn from the verb in the seventeenth century, not the reverse. Beside them stand gushing, gushed, gushy, and gusher.
From entrails to oil wells
Meaning moved outward from the physical stream.
In the sixteenth century a person or a part of the body could gush with blood or tears, and writers used the verb transitively: to send liquid out in a flood. Figurative emission—anything that issues copiously—appears in the same century. The noun, a sudden flow of liquid, is recorded around 1682. During the eighteenth century that noun stretched to rushes of wind, bursts of light, heat, and sound, and then to outbursts of feeling; a translation of Homer by Alexander Pope is cited for the emotional sense around 1720. In northern and eastern English dialects a gush could also mean a gust of wind, which again keeps the word next to gust. Scotland had a gush-hole, an outlet in a wall for water.
The talkative sense is Victorian. Sources place effusive, sentimental speech in the 1860s, with first dates that range from 1863 to 1873. The noun for such talk belongs to the same decade. A gusher was first, in 1864, a person who talked that way. Only in 1886 did gusher become the oil-field term for a well that flows without pumping. The petroleum sense did not create the word; it reused the older picture of liquid that will not stay put.
A dating you can keep
If the donor language remains in dispute, two facts do not. The liquid verb is late medieval. The sense of overdone praise is nineteenth-century. And even if Norse is only a parallel, not a parent, geyser is a useful neighbor: English named those springs from an Icelandic word for a gusher, a reminder that this cluster of pouring and spouting has been busy on both sides of the North Sea for a long time.