the.com/rumor mill

means The informal, ever-churning network of gossip and secondhand talk through which stories spread and mutate before anyone checks if they're true.

from Built from two plain words: 'rumor' traces back to Latin 'rumorem,' meaning noise or common talk, and 'mill' comes from the everyday grain mill, where raw material goes in one end and gets ground into something else entirely. The phrase fuses them into a factory metaphor — gossip as industrial process, feeding in scraps of hearsay and grinding out finished stories. It's a relatively modern English coinage, showing up as the image of workplaces, small towns, and later newsrooms running their own ceaseless production line of talk.