Meaning of Idiom ‘Run the Gamut’
To run the gamut means to extend over an entire range; to experience, display, or perform the complete range of something; to include everything of a group or type. 1Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.,2Ayto, John. Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms. Oxford: Oxford U, 2010.,3Heacock, Paul. Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Sometimes confused with run the gauntlet.
Usage
The word from is often included, as in the following examples.
Sentence Examples
“He can play anything. He guitar playing runs the gamut from classical to rock. He can even play Asian styles of music.”
“We had quite a talk. It ran the gamut from philosophy to theoretical physics.”
“When drinking, his behavior runs the gamut from entertaining and amusing to downright pathetic and sad.
“I visited an interesting curios shop yesterday. Their inventory ran the gamut from the whimsical to the macabre.”
Run the Gamut Origin
Used as an idiom since the mid-1800s. heritage
The word gamut is a contraction of the medievel Latin musical notation gamma ut, where gamma is the lowest note in the musical scale uido d’Arezzo, and ut is the first six notes. These represent the full range of notes that a voice or instrument can produce. 4Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.,5Ayto, John. Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms. Oxford: Oxford U, 2010.
Guido d’Arezzo was an 11th-century musician and monk who invented his own way of using syllables to represent musical notes, similar to the do, re, mi, fa, sol, lat, ti, do we know today and which was made famous in the movie The Sound of Music.
In d’Arrezzo’s scale, the last syllable was ut instead of do. Gamma ut was his term for a note written on the first line of his bass staff. Over time, this became shortened to gamut and later still began to refer to all the notes of d’Arrezzo’s scale and then all the notes an instrument could produce. Over time, the meaning of gamut was generalized to become any stepwise range. Thus to run the gamut means to experience or perform the complete range of something or to include everything possible within a group or type. 6“Gamut.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gamut. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
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