Chatter

How to spell chatter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chatter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chatter mean?

1. verbTo talk rapidly and at length about unimportant things, or to make a series of quick rattling sounds.
2. nounA continuous stream of rapid, trivial talk, or a series of quick rattling sounds.

Chatter in a sentence

• verb

  The children would chatter happily on the long car journey.

• noun

  The constant chatter in the open-plan office made it hard to concentrate.

• verb

  The cold made his teeth chatter as he waited for the bus.

• noun

  The nervous chatter died down once the speaker reached the podium.

Where does chatter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Chatter is an echoic, or imitative, word: it was coined in Middle English around the 1200s to mimic the rapid, broken sounds of birds and of people talking quickly about nothing in particular. The base imitates a clipped, repeated noise, and the ending -er is the frequentative suffix that English attaches to verbs to suggest an action done over and over, as in 'flutter', 'patter', and 'glitter'. Because the word was built from sound rather than borrowed from Latin or French, it has no learned root to explain its spelling; the double t simply reflects the short, sharp vowel that precedes it. The related noun 'chat' is actually a later shortening, so the longer 'chatter' came first. The same imitative instinct gives us the sense of teeth or machinery that rattle rapidly, a meaning that grew naturally out of the original idea of quick repeated noise.

How the word is built

• chat (imitative base)
• -er (frequentative suffix denoting repeated action)