the.com/hearsay

means Information you heard from someone else rather than witnessed or verified yourself — gossip dressed as fact.

from A straightforward compound from English: 'hear' plus 'say,' literally 'what is heard said.' It emerged in the 1500s to describe secondhand report, and became especially fixed in legal usage, where 'hearsay evidence' was marked out as testimony about what someone else said rather than what the witness directly saw or knew — making the word's courtroom sense almost as old as its everyday one.