gutter [ME] ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,’ wrote Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). A gutter was originally a watercourse, either a natural or an artificial one, and the word comes via Old French gotiere from Latin gutta ‘a drop’. In the 16th century this became ‘a furrow or track made by running water’, from which developed the main modern meaning. The gutter became the habitat of very poor people in the mid 19th century, and newspapers that pursue sensational stories about the private lives of public figures have been known as the gutter press since the end of that century, with gutter journalism appearing in the middle of the century. See also gout.