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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
PCMAG, 24 Mar. 2025
The 500 nits maximum brightness and DCI-P3 color gamut coverage are unchanged from previous models.
—Ars Technica, 11 Mar. 2025
The other three pieces run the genre gamut from romance to dystopian sci-fi.
—Grace Byron, Vulture, 11 Mar. 2025
China-mania spanned the ideological gamut: Black Power activists brandished copies of Mao’s little red book.
—Mark Tseng-Putterman / Made By History, TIME, 10 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for gamut
Cite this Entry
“Gamut.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamut. Accessed 3 Apr. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
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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