A similar event happened in the history of the word gossip. Old Engl. godsibb (a sponsor in baptism) (=”a sponsor in God”) is a compound of the same type as godfather, godmother, godchild, with the only difference that -sibb (akin, related) was not a noun but an adjective turned into a noun. Later, gossip came to mean “a familiar acquaintance of either sex, now principally female” (in folk tales, old gossip is “old woman”) and “tattler; idle talk.” Two minor phonetic processes (the dropping of -d- and the substitution of -p- for final -b-), accompanied by radical change of meaning (from “a sponsor in God” to “ill-founded rumours” and “trivial tittle-tattle”) severed the tie between the modern word and its former constituents.
Anthony Liberman, Word Origins… and how we know them
