Gamut

noun

The entirety of a spectrum of which something is a part
All of the notes contained in a musical scale or range

Usage

Having choice is great, but at times it seems there are too many options to decide from. The array of possibilities can even be so wide that the only thing they all have in common is that they could fall under one category. When you are offered this much freedom, you truly have a gamut open to you.

A gamut is the full spectrum that a thing belongs to. As it simply describes a range, gamut is rarely used by itself, but offered in conjunction with an example object or group of objects to show the larger scale to which they belong. To that end, the word is most commonly employed when one states that a class of items "runs the gamut," meaning that there is an incredibly diverse array of items in the stated class. If something constitutes one among a gamut of related things, those things could be almost indistinguishably similar, or they may be so tangential that they verge on being unrelated.

Gamut also retains a specialized and somewhat dated meaning of the set of musical notes that belongs to a given scale. The term comes from Medieval Western musical note naming conventions, originally designating the lowest note in that era of music's harmonic structure. Gamut was subsequently adapted to mean the complete range of notes used in Medieval music and, later, in all of Western classical music or in any musical instrument.

Aside from music, gamut has other technical uses for classifying other spectra. The most prominent example of this is the idea of a color gamut, which can be used to either describe the range of colors that a device or software program is capable of reproducing from a given color space, or color measurement system. This technical sense is seen most often in conjunction with measuring the available color palette of a computer, television, or mobile device screen. By gauging this range, one can determine how faithfully the screen can display images compared to their natural appearance (i.e. as if they were observed in person with the naked eye). A color gamut can also define the range or colors hues contained in a single image which, again, is useful for determining how easily it can be reproduced without loss of vibrancy. The key here, though, is that even in the specific context of color gamut, the word gamut relies upon its understanding as constituting a spectrum or scale, just as it does in its musical and colloquial uses.

Example: Jay Leno's extensive car collection runs the gamut from turn-of-the-century buggies to high-octane modern sports cars.

Example: With recent advancements in medicine, the gamut of HIV/AIDS treatments is considerably wider than it was not even a decade ago.

Example: The impressive gamut the tenor could sing equipped him to perform the most demanding roles in the opera repertoire.

Origin

The word gamut originated in Western classical music from the Medieval period, coming from the contraction of "gamma" and "ut." "Gamma" was the name given to the lowest note used in the musical scales from that time, which was the G one-and-a-half octaves below middle C, or G2 in modern note classification, while "ut" was the original designation given to the first note of a scale, which has since been replaced by the solfege syllable "do." Gamut began to be used to describe the full set of notes in Western classical music in the early 17th century, with its English use to mean a full spectrum of anything emerging shortly after.

In Literature

From Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front:

At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.

Here, Remarque contends that the soldiers' instensive training was enough to drown out the influences of the whole range, or gamut, of the Western literary and philosophical canon, "from Plato to Goethe."

From Ezra Klein's piece in Vox: "Was Carly Fiorina an okay CEO or a terrible one? It doesn't really matter.":

Verdicts on Carly Fiorina's time as CEO of Hewlett-Packard seem to run the gamut from faint praise to sweeping indictment.

Klein starts off his piece assessing the impact Fiorina's executive experience has on public perception of her by noting that it is so wildly inconsistent that it varies all the way between, or runs the gamut from, being somewhat celebrated to roundly condemned.

From the New York Times article:"Heat Overpower Clippers to End Road Skid":

The Clippers had no answer for the 7-foot Whiteside, in his third year out of Marshall. His offensive display ran the gamut and included tipins, dunks and jumpers.

The game summary highlights the great variety in Whiteside's play style by noting that it encompassed a range, or ran the gamut, from dunks right at the net to jump shots from a distance.

Mnemonic

Gamma is a letter in the gamut between alpha and zeta.
Your odds are low when you gamble on one of a gamut.

Gamut

Usage

Origin

In Literature

Mnemonic

Tags