means The process by which particles or waves are deflected and dispersed in many directions after striking something — or, more loosely, a small, irregular amount spread thinly across an area.

from From the verb "scatter," which surfaces in Middle English as "scateren," likely a variant of "shatter" — the two words share a sense of breaking apart into many pieces and flying off in all directions. The deeper roots are obscure, possibly echoing a Germanic stem for dispersing. The physics sense (light scattering, radar) is a modern borrowing of the everyday word: photons and radio waves, it turns out, scatter much as a handful of seeds flung across a field.