Hands and Legs

Two words I’ve heard get confused are the words gambit and gamut. They are most often used in the phrases “opening gambit” and “run the gamut between…”. Because of their similarity in sound it poses problems for those who don’t see the words to know that they are two different words.


Gambit is a chess term that refers to a strategy where a pawn or other piece is sacrificed to get an advantage in position. It has come to mean any maneuver or action intended to create an advantage. What’s interesting about the word is that its etymology takes us on a tour of Europe. It came to English from the French, from the Old French word gambit, which came from the Spanish word gambito that means a tripping. The Spanish word was derived from the Italian word for leg – gamba – which is also the word in Late Latin. We get another word from this source word: gam, an American slang word for a woman’s shapely leg.

Gambit was first used in English in the 1650s, but the Spanish writer Ruy Lopez applied the word to the opening move as described above. It didn’t obtain its broader English meaning for two centuries, until 1855.

Gamut, on the other hand, means the entire range or extent, as in emotions. It came from music, from Guido “The Hand” D’Arezzo. Actually, I made up the appellation “The Hand”. It is a sad echoing of Mafia nicknames and I apologize to any Italians or Sicilians I offended. But there is a very well known musical history phrase “Guido’s Hand”.

Guido was a Benedictine monk born in the last decade of the 10th century. He died between 1033 and 1050. (It didn’t take him 17 years to die – there are differing opinions as to the year of his death.) Guido was the first person to develop musical notation, even developing what is the staff (although his had four lines and ours has five) and notes on the staff, and ledger lines for notes above and below the staff. He also used the hand to teach notes and scales, with the tips of the fingers corresponding to the top line of the staff and the lowest joint on the finger corresponding to the lowest line on the staff. He even developed words for the series of notes in a scale, deriving them from a hymn written a couple of centuries earlier. Like the song Do-Re-Mi from “The Sound of Music”, each line begins on a new note in the scale, the first syllables of each line being (in Latin) Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Sanc. By the 20th Century the Ut was changed to Do and the Sanc to Ti.

What does all this have to do with gamut? In the 1520s, the Middle Latin phrase that referred to the lowest note in the scale, Ut, was gamma ut. Its contraction formed the word gamut, and a century later the word gamut came to refer to the entire scale or range of any string of items, not just the lowest note in a scale.

And now we've done the ambit of gamut and gambit. But we're out of space, so ambit will have to wait for another day.