The term "gamut" was adopted from the field of music, where in middle age Latin "gamut" meant the entire range of musical notes of which musical melodies are composed; Shakespeare's use of the term in "The Taming of the Shrew" is sometimes attributed to the author/musician Thomas Morley. In the 1850s, the term was applied to a range of colors or hue, for example by Thomas De Quincey, who wrote "Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a gamut of hues as marble."