Other forms: chattering, chatters, chattered
To chatter is to talk fast and lightly about nothing much. Two friends chattering the whole bus ride, a classroom that will not settle, the queue outside the cinema.
The word says the talk is small, not that it is stupid — but that is why you would not use it for a serious conversation. Chatter is also a noun: the chatter of the crowd, background chatter on the radio, and a chatterbox is someone who never stops. Animals chatter too — magpies, monkeys, squirrels — and so do machine parts that judder. Your teeth chatter with cold or fear, and that one is not talk at all: it is the knocking sound. Intelligence services borrowed the noun for intercepted messages, which is why you hear about a rise in chatter before something happens.
1verbchatterTo talk quickly about small, unimportant things.~2%
“They chattered all the way to the station.”
2verbteethOf teeth, to knock together quickly from cold or fear.~2%
“His teeth chattered as he climbed out of the lake.”
3verbbirdsOf birds, animals or machinery, to make a rapid run of short sounds.~32%
“Magpies chattered in the top of the pine.”
4nounlightLight, unimportant talk, or a steady background of it.~64%
“The chatter died down when the head walked in.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Chatter is a copy of a noise. Middle English chateren, and earlier chiteren, meant 'to twitter, chatter, jabber', and the word was made by imitating the sound itself. Danish kvidre, 'to twitter, chirp', was built the same way, out of the same kind of listening.
Middle English
chateren
English, today
chatter
Built from
From Middle English chateren, from Middle English [[cheteren. From Middle English chateren, from earlier cheteren, chiteren (“to twitter, chatter, jabber”), of imitative of the sound origin. Compare stq tjoaterje (“to chatter”), West Frisian tsjotterje (“to chatter”), Dutch schateren, schetteren (“chatter”), Dutch koeteren (“jabber”), Middle Low German kidderen (“to chatter”), German Low German queteln (“to chatter”), dialectal German kaudern (“to gobble (like a turkey)”), Danish kvidre (“to twitter, chirp”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA