Word of the Day: June 17, 2009 - gamut

gamut (gam-uht) - noun

Gamut means "the complete range or extent."

First used in the written form around 1425–1475. Gamut began life as a medieval musical term. The 11th-century French-born musical theorist Guido d'Arezzo devised the hexachord, a six-note scale used for sight-reading music (and the forerunner of the modern tonis sol-fa). The notes were mnemonically named ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (after, according to legend, syllables in a Latin hymn to St. John). The note below the lowest note (ut) became known as gamma-ut (gamma, the name of the Greek equivalent of g, having been used in the medieval notation for the note bottom G). And in due course gamma-ut, or by contraction in English gamut, came to be applied to the whole scale, and hence figuratively to any "complete range."