Have you watched The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix? Do you enjoy playing chess? If so, you may find yourself accidentally confusing “gamut” with “gambit,” as one of my clients recently did. In fact, over the past year, I have seen confusion over these two words pop up repeatedly, usually with the author incorrectly writing “the whole gambit.”

Btw, What the Heck Is a Gambit?

So, what the heck is a gambit? A friend of mine recently confessed that he didn’t even know the meaning of the word. He’s a smart cookie when it comes to language, so I’m guessing there’s more like him out there. Let’s me help to clear up the confusion. A gambit is an opening chess move in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage. In simple terms, it’s a chess move, and hopefully it pans out for the one doing it.

The word gamut refers to the complete range or scope of something. My oldest daughter (I have two girls) is about to leave home and start her first year of college. Our little family is a tight trio, so I’m feeling the whole gamut of emotions: excited, happy, proud (she’s an absolutely incredible person, and I raised her on my own), sad, uneasy, slightly worried (I’m a mom, enough said), and even envious (truthfully, a part of me wants to be eighteen again). Like I said, the whole gamut of emotions. I can’t say the whole gambit of emotions, because that wouldn’t make any sense at all.

We All Make Mistakes…

You might even hear “the whole gambit” as a spoken typo, like I did the other day. I was on a walk with a newish friend who has yet to learn the whole gamut of my love for the English language, so when he was sharing a recent problem he had at work and talked of his “whole gambit of problems,” I chose to let it slide and said to myself, we all make mistakes. We all need Editor Nancy.