Growth of nonsymmetric operads

The paper concerns the Gelfand-Kirillov dimension and the generating series of nonsymmetric operads. An analogue of Bergman's gap theorem is proved, namely, no finitely generated locally finite nonsymmetric operad has Gelfand-Kirillov dimension strictly between $1$ and $2$. For every $r\in \{0\}\cup \{1\}\cup [2,\infty)$ or $r=\infty$, we construct a single-element generated nonsymmetric operad with Gelfand-Kirillov dimension $r$. We also provide counterexamples to two expectations of Khoroshkin and Piontkovski about the generating series of operads.