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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
Declan Gallagher, Entertainment Weekly, 14 June 2026
The image tech itself is 4K UHD resolution with a high level of brightness of up to 1,000 nits, plus HDR and wide color gamut technology with 64 billion colors available.
—New Atlas, 13 June 2026
Discourse about the film has run the gamut, dissecting everything from its breakout leads to its low-budget ingenuity.
—Olivia Tauber, Vanity Fair, 12 June 2026
In just six episodes (early seasons were shorter), Widdicombe managed to run the gamut from successful watermelon binger to wheelbarrow tea brewer.
—Matthew Jackson, Vulture, 12 June 2026
See All Example Sentences for gamut
Cite this Entry
“Gamut.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamut. Accessed 18 Jun. 2026.
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"
