puts

This is the common word for breaking a gathered group apart so that its members end up spread across a wide space. It works in both directions: someone (or something) does the scattering, and the people or things scattered get spread abroad. The picture is always a single mass that becomes many separated pieces, whether that is an army melting away from its commander, a crowd dispersing to their tents, seed flung across a field, or arrows shot in every direction.

The word carries its heaviest weight in the prophets, where God is the one who scatters. There it names the central catastrophe of Israel's story: a people pulled out of their land and spread among the nations as judgment. That theological use grows out of the plain physical meaning rather than replacing it, so both belong to one word. The two senses below mark that difference in setting, not a difference in the core idea of forcing a gathered group apart.

The scattering can be a threat, a punishment already carried out, or a thing God promises to reverse by gathering his people back. The same verb that disperses also frames the hope of return, since what was scattered can be brought home again.

Standard lexicons recognize a second, much rarer word spelled the same way, meaning to flow or overflow. The picture is water spreading out from its source rather than people spreading out from a group, so it is a genuinely different idea even though it shares the spelling and the rough notion of spreading.

Its one clear home is the image of springs flowing out into the open streets. Whether this is truly a separate word or the scatter word applied to water is debated, but the major lexicons list it on its own, which is why it stands here as its own meaning rather than being forced under scattering.

A third word folded under the same number comes from a separate root and means to smash or break to pieces. It is the violence of a hammer on rock or a blow that breaks a body apart, not the spreading of a gathered group, so the standard lexicons treat it as a different word that only happens to share this entry.

It is rare and turns up in vivid, often poetic descriptions of destruction: God's word likened to a hammer that breaks rock, ancient mountains shattered at his coming, and a sufferer describing how he was broken in pieces.