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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
Randy McMullen, Mercury News, 5 June 2025
The panel covered a wide gamut, yielding some provocative takes.
—Dade Hayes, Deadline, 5 June 2025
This series covers the gamut, all set the actual site of the Hanford nuclear reactor nuclear clean-up site in Washington state, where 56 million gallons of toxic nuclear waste is buried in the dirt — and leaking — and making its way to the Columbia River.
—Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 June 2025
The drones themselves run a gamut of cost and lethality.
—Nataliya Gumenyuk, The Atlantic, 27 May 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 10 Jun. 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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