/bruːt/
[verb] To spread a report or rumour widely; to make something known by talking about it openly. When news or gossip is 'bruited about,' it means many people are hearing and repeating it.
This word for spreading rumours is literally rooted in the medieval French word for 'noise' — and before that, the howling of animals.
The word 'bruit' carries the sound of old streets and whispered corners with it, arriving in English in the 15th century from the Old French noun 'bruit,' meaning 'noise,' 'rumour,' or 'report.' This Old French word came from the verb 'bruire,' meaning 'to roar' or 'to make a noise,' which itself descended from a Vulgar Latin form *'brogere' or *'bragere,' likely blended with the Latin 'rugire,' meaning 'to roar' — the sound a lion or the ocean might make. At its heart, then, 'bruit' is a word about raw, uncontrolled sound.
In Old French, 'bruit' was used quite broadly for any loud noise or commotion, but it also developed the figurative sense of a story travelling through a crowd — the kind of news that moves like sound itself, passing from mouth to mouth. This leap from physical noise to social rumour is entirely natural: gossip, after all, is nothing more than organised noise. By the time English borrowed the word, it had already settled firmly into this figurative meaning. Early English uses, found in texts from the late 1400s onward, treat 'bruit' as both a noun and a verb, speaking of news being 'bruited abroad' across the land.
The noun form had a slightly grander register in early English — it could mean a person's reputation or fame, the kind of talk that precedes a great figure's arrival. Shakespeare used it in this way, and it appears in military chronicles where the 'bruit' of a battle referred to the reports and stories spreading outward from the conflict. This older, more majestic sense has largely faded, but it shows how a word about rumour could also touch glory and renown — two things that also travel by word of mouth.
Interestingly, the same Old French root 'bruire' gave English another descendant through a different path: the word 'broil,' in its older sense of noisy confusion or turmoil (distinct from cooking), shares this ancestry. Old French 'bruire' → Old French 'broillier' → Middle English 'broil' (meaning uproar). It is a reminder that the family of noise-words is a large and unruly one.
In modern English, 'bruit' survives in a specialised medical sense as well, borrowed directly from French once again in the 19th century: a 'bruit' (pronounced the French way, /bruːɪ/) is an abnormal sound heard through a stethoscope, caused by turbulent blood flow. The connection to noise is perfectly preserved here — doctors listening for something wrong are, in a very literal sense, listening for a rumour the body is telling about itself.
Today, the verb 'bruit about' or 'bruit abroad' is considered somewhat formal or literary in everyday English, but it has never quite disappeared. Writers reach for it when they want to suggest the slightly unstoppable, atmospheric quality of a story moving through a community — something more than mere gossip, but not quite confirmed fact. It fills a gap that no other single English word quite manages, which is perhaps why, after six centuries, it is still with us.