Origins
Drop a glass on a stone floor and you will see the relationship between scatter and shatter in a single moment. The two words are likely siblings, both descended from a Germanic root carrying the idea of violent dispersal.
Scatter entered English in the 12th century as Middle English scateren, probably a dialectal variant of shateren. The core image is the same: something whole breaks apart and its pieces fly outward. To scatter seeds is to fling them as nature flings fragments of a broken pod.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
The word may connect to Proto-Germanic *skat- meaning 'to spring' or 'to leap' — capturing the quick outward motion of things being dispersed. Related forms appear across the Germanic languages: Middle Dutch skatten ('to burst'), Dutch schetteren ('to blare out'), German schmettern ('to smash').
Scatter has generated colourful compounds. A scatterbrain, first attested around 1790, is someone whose thoughts fly in all directions. Scattershot describes an approach that fires broadly without precision. Even in physics, scattering describes particles deflected in multiple directions after a collision — the scientific term preserving the word's original violence.