Richard Creed, who inspired a thread I started a moment ago under Wordplay, also ruminates on the question of whether a politician must run a 'gantlet', or a 'gauntlet', of trials and tests in the primaries. Do you think of the words as interchangeabe? Would you ever use words, other than in the phrases 'run the ga(u)ntlet' or 'throw down the ga(u)ntlet'?

Creed also says, "Tracing the etymology is a complex business." Complex etymology is our business, so let's go to it, and get the details!

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I've never seen the spelling 'gantlet' in actual use, but apparently it's an American variant for both senses. This maven wants to insist a gantlet is the thing you run, but I suspect someone's been browsing in dictionaries too much, and would like the differentiation because of the etymology. These mavens more sensibly note just that there once was a preference for 'run the gantlet' among some American writers.

The Swedish gatlopp 'lane-course' was assimilated to the glove as soon as it was borrowed: SOED gives 1646 for gantlope and 1661 for gauntlet.

The puzzling thing about this word is where the N came from, and one possibility is from 'gauntlet': that is there was very briefly an English word *'gatlope', a course to run, which immediately got influenced by the glove.

Another possibility is that the Swedish vowel caused it. It would have been [a] as in 'father', whereas the usual value of English A then was as in 'cat'. But before nC you often get or got AU: staunch, launch, daunt, and formerly such as advauntage; and while I'm not sure about the pronunciation of these in the mid 1600s, a representation of Swedish [a] with AU might have been normal, but AUT was not and it picked up an N from the general run of such words, rather than from gauntlet = glove specifically.

The spelling variations gantlet/gauntlet for both senses are just this spelling convention for the vowel: they're not particular to this word so they don't particularly depend on the etymology. There used to be lots more like advauntage. Many of them moved across to the CAT vowel [æ], and in 1800s Southern England many of them (aunt, plant, advantage but not ant, gantry, banter) adopted the [a:] vowel piecemeal. So modern pronunciations are often an unreliable guide to the etymologies.

I didn't know the variant "gantlet" existed until this post. I see that it appears to be an American spelling, and would guess that if it had been used by any American author I'd read, the editor of the book would have changed it to the normal British spelling in the edition I'd see.

I too have never seen that spelling before, and I'm from America. Perhaps it is an archaic American spelling? The word isn't too common in print, though upon seeing gantlet I immediately thought it was a typo.

I've never seen gantlet before, either.