The last post covered the etymology of the word “alphabet,” which comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. A couple of other English words are also derived from the names of Greek letters. “Jot,” meaning to write down quickly and briefly, comes from the name for the smallest Greek letter, iota. (More on the relationship between the letters “i” and “j” in a later entry.) The original meaning of “jot” is something insignificant. This is the meaning found in the passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, (5:18), “For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. “ The word “tittle,” by the way, is the name for the dot used over the letter “i,” and also refers to a small, insignificant thing.
The word “gamut,” meaning the full range of a thing, comes from a contraction of the words, “gamma ut.” “Gamma,” is name of a Greek letter, which in medieval times was appropriated to refer to the note below A in the medieval scale. (The ancient Greeks themselves used their letters to refer not only to the sounds of the language, but as symbols for musical notes as well as for numbers.) “Ut,” was the name for the first tone of the scale, and was taken from the accented syllables of a hymn (in Latin) to St. John. Whereas the term “alphabet” employs the names of the first to letters to refer to the entire sequence of letters, the term “gamma ut” or “gamut” uses the first and the last notes on the scale to refer to the whole scale. The modern meaning of the word is a metaphorical extension of this original meaning.
Two other Greek letter names deserve mention: omicron and omega. The Greeks used two forms of the letter o, a “small” or short-sound, o-mikron, literally o-small, and a large or long-sound, o-mega, literally o-large.
