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With the song “Do-Re-Mi,” the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music (adapted from the 1958 stage musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein) introduced millions of non-musicians to solfège, the singing of the sol-fa syllables—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti—to teach the tones of a musical scale. Centuries earlier, however, the do in “Do-Re-Mi” was known as ut. Indeed, the first note on the scale of Guido d’Arezzo, an 11th century musician and monk who had his own way of applying syllables to musical tones, was ut. d’Arezzo also called the first line of his bass staff gamma, which meant that gamma ut was the term for a note written on the first staff line. In time, gamma ut underwent a shortening to gamut, and later its meaning expanded first to cover all the notes of d’Arezzo’s scale, then to cover all the notes in the range of an instrument, and, eventually, to cover an entire range of any sort.
Examples of gamut in a Sentence
John Archer, Forbes, 30 Oct. 2024
Its top-quality giclée prints run the creative gamut.
—Julia Harrison, Architectural Digest, 28 Oct. 2024
The credit for the color gamut goes to Hisense's own TriChroma triple-laser engine, which uses red, green, and blue lasers for its primary colors, rotating through them sequentially.
—PCMAG, 13 Oct. 2024
Williams’s book covers the gamut of wellness, self-care, and self-empowerment through her STRIVE strategy: a winning combination of holistic and scientific approaches to wellness and performance that focuses on making self-improvements reachable and attainable.
—Dominique Fluker, Essence, 6 Sep. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Gamut.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamut. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.
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gamut
noun
probably a contraction of gamma ut, a Latin expression in the Middle Ages for "the full range of notes in music," from gamma "the lowest note on the staff" and ut "the first note of the scale"
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