/reɪndʒ/
[noun] A set of different things of the same general type, or the full extent between two limits. It can also refer to a large open area of land, a place for shooting practice, or a cooking stove.
The word 'range' began life as a line of soldiers standing in a row — order and arrangement, not open wilderness.
The story of 'range' begins in medieval France, with the Old French verb 'rengier', meaning to arrange in a line or to put things in order. This came from 'renc' or 'rang', meaning a row or rank — a word the Franks had inherited from their Germanic ancestors, related to the Old High German 'hring', meaning a ring or circle. The idea at the heart of the word was always one of organised arrangement: things set out in sequence, placed in deliberate order alongside one another.
This Old French 'rengier' gave English 'range' in the 13th century, arriving during that long period after the Norman Conquest when French vocabulary was flooding into the English language. Its earliest English meaning stayed close to the original: a row, a rank, or a line of things arranged in order. You might speak of a range of mountains, meaning a line of peaks stretching across the horizon — a meaning that survives almost unchanged to this day.
From the idea of a line or row, the word naturally stretched to cover the space that such a line might occupy or cross. If a row of mountains reaches from one place to another, then 'range' begins to suggest extent — how far something goes, how much ground it covers. By the 16th century, 'range' was being used to describe the distance over which something could travel or operate, such as the range of a cannon or the range of a voice. The word had moved from arrangement to reach.
The sense of open land came somewhat later, particularly in the American West, where 'range' described the vast, unfenced grasslands over which cattle could roam freely. This usage grew especially prominent in the 19th century, and it gave the language the 'ranger' — originally someone who patrolled a wide stretch of land, a word built directly on top of 'range' by adding the familiar '-er' suffix for a person who does something. The Texas Rangers and the park ranger both carry this ancestry.
The cooking stove called a 'range' arrived in the late 18th century, almost certainly because the stove's long flat surface with multiple burners or cooking spots suggested a row — again, that original idea of things arranged in a line. And the firing range, a place where people practise shooting, echoes the old military sense of measuring how far a weapon could send its projectile. Every meaning of this remarkably busy word traces back to that same medieval image: a row of things, carefully placed, reaching from one point to another.