gamut [OE] To run the gamut is to experience or display the complete range of something. In medieval music gamut was originally the name of the lowest note in the scale, but the term also came to be applied to the full range of notes which a voice or instrument can produce. From c.1600 it started to be used outside musical contexts. According to the acerbic American critic and humorist Dorothy Parker, the film actress Katharine Hepburn ‘ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B’. Gamut comes from medieval Latin gamma ut. The Greek letter Γ (gamma) was used for bass G, with ut indicating that it was the first note in the lowest of the hexachords or six-note scales. Notes in each hexachord were named using syllables of a Latin hymn for St John the Baptist’s Day in which each line began on the next note of the scale: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes. A seventh note, si, was added later, from the initial letters of Sancte Iohannes ‘St John’. The scheme was adapted in the 19th century for the tonic sol-fa.