Here’s an English-language oddity; you can utter words, and the words you utter can be utter nonsense! That’s right, “utter” and “utter” are utterly different words.
Well, maybe not utterly different. They are different words, but they come from the same source: the Old English word “uttera,” which was the adjective form of “ut” (by which you meant, in Old English, “out.” To the Anglo-Saxons, say, around the year 900, “utter” meant either “farther away” or “the exterior portion.” Here’s an example from King AElfred’s Laws in 900:
“ðæt uterre ban bið þyrel”
That meant “the utter edge of the hole”, and no, I have no idea why King AElfred had a law having to do with edges of holes.
“Uttera” (which was also spelled (utara, uterra, uterre, and probably several other ways) turned into “utter” in Middle English, where it was used to mean absolute, complete, or total. A verse from the 1430 romance Generides reads:
“This wer to us…an uttir shame for evermore.”
The word “utter” to mean say something began to show up around the 1400s, along with a third word “utter,” which has disappeared, but meant to offer something for sale. This “utter” also comes from the Old English “ut,” but it’s also related to the Middle Dutch word “uteren,” which meant announce or speak.
There was originally a difference between the “utter” meaning “to make a sound”:
“the utterying of his voice begane to breke” (a book from 1400 about the founding of St. Bartholomew’s Church in London)
…and the “utter” meaning to speak:
“Yiff thow art feerffulle to ottre thy language” (1444, “Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems”, by John Lydgate)
But nowadays “utter” — the one about noise — is almost entirely used to refer to speaking. The other meanings have utterly disappeared.
