Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A complete range or extent.
- noun Music The entire series of recognized notes.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In music:
- noun The first or gravest note in Guido's scale of music; gamma ut.
- noun The major scale, whether indicated by notes or syllables, or merely sung.
- noun A scale on which notes in music are written or printed, consisting of lines and spaces which are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet.
- noun In old Eng. church music, the key of G. Also
gamma . - noun Figuratively, the whole scale, range, or compass of a thing.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Mus.) The scale.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A (normally)
complete range . - noun music All the
notes in the musicalscale . - noun All the
colours available to a device such as amonitor orprinter .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the entire scale of musical notes
- noun a complete extent or range:
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Middle English, the musical scale, from Medieval Latin gamma ut, low G : gamma, lowest note of the medieval scale (from Greek, gamma; see gamma) + ut, first note of the lowest hexachord (after ut, first word in a Latin hymn to Saint John the Baptist, the initial syllables of successive lines of which were sung to the notes of an ascending scale CDEFGA: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes).]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
1520s, original sense “lowest note of musical scale”, from Medieval Latin gamma ut, from gamma ("(Greek letter, corresponding to the musical note G)") + ut ("first solfège syllable, now replaced by do"). In modern terms, “G do” – the first note of the G scale Meaning later extended to mean all the notes of a scale, and then more generally any complete range.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word gamut.
Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
shevek commented on the word gamut
Comes from the lowest note in medieval music pedagogy, which was called Gamma-Ut. Gamma because it was lowest octave of the note G, Ut because it was the tonic of a Guidonian hexachord.
September 12, 2008
elisheba commented on the word gamut
thanks for this explanation, shevek!
September 12, 2008
sionnach commented on the word gamut
So would Tut-tut be the tonic of a defunct Guidonian hexapharaoh. The kind of pick-me-up my mummy used to prepare for me.
Seriously, that is a cool explanation. Though I'm surprised nobody has yet sullied this page with the quote about the Hollywood starlet whose emotions "ran the gamut from A to B".
September 12, 2008
jwjarvis commented on the word gamut
gamut of communication tools
September 30, 2010