Grey

"Achromatic" redirects here. For other uses, see Achromatic (disambiguation).

Grey/Gray
Common connotations
depression, boredom, neutrality, undefinedness, old age, contentment and speed
Color coordinates
Hex triplet	#808080
sRGBB (r, g, b)	(128, 128, 128)
HSV (h, s, v)	(0°, 0%, 50%)
CIELChuv (L, C, h)	(54, 0, 0°)
Source	HTML/CSS
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

Grey (often spelled gray in the U.S., see spelling differences) describes the colors ranging from black to white. These, including white and black, are known as achromatic colors or neutral colors. These "new" neutrals have low colorfulness and chroma.

Complementary colors are defined to mix to grey, either additively or subtractively, and many color models place complements opposite each-other in a color wheel. To produce grey in RGB displays, the R, G, and B primary light sources are combined in proportions equal to that of the white point. In four-color printing, greys are produced either by the black channel, or by an approximately equal combination of CMY primaries. Images which consist wholly of neutral colors are called monochrome, black-and-white or greyscale.

The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700.

In color theory

Most grey pigments have a cool or warm cast to them, as the human eye can detect even a minute amount of saturation. Yellow, orange, and red create a "warm grey". Green, blue, and violet create a "cool grey". When there is no cast at all, it is referred to as "neutral grey", "achromatic grey" or simply "grey".

WARM GREY	COOL GREY
Mixed with 6% yellow.	Mixed with 6% blue.

Two colors are called complementary colors if grey is produced when they are combined(in the light spectrum, but as in art it produces brown with paints usually). Grey is its own complement. Consequently, grey remains grey when its color spectrum is inverted, and so has no opposite, or alternately is its own opposite.

Artists sometimes use the two different spellings to distinguish between strict combinations of black and white versus combinations that have elements of hue.

Web colors

There are several tones of grey available for use with HTML and CSS in word form, while there are 254 true greys available through Hex triplet. All are spelled with an a: using the e spelling can cause unexpected errors (this spelling was inherited from the X11 color list), and to this day, Internet Explorer's Trident browser engine does not recognize "grey" and will render it as green. Another anomaly is that "gray" is in fact much darker than the X11 color marked "darkgray"; this is because of a conflict with the original HTML gray and the X11's "gray", which is closer to HTML's "silver". The three "slategray" colors are not themselves on the grey scale, but are slightly saturated towards cyan (green + blue). Note that since there are an even (256, including black and white) number of unsaturated tones of grey, there are actually two grey tones straddling the midpoint in the 8-bit greyscale. The color name "gray" has been assigned the lighter of the two shades (128 also known as #808080), due to rounding up. In browsers that support it, "grey" has the same color as "gray".

HTML Color Name Sample Hex triplet (rendered by name) (rendered by hex triplet) lightgray #D3D3D3 gray #808080 darkgray #A9A9A9 dimgray #696969 lightslategray #778899 slategray #708090 darkslategray #2F4F4F

Color coordinates

RGB

Grey values result when r = g = b, for the color (r, g, b)

CMYK

Grey values are produced by c = m = y = 0, for the color (c, m, y, k). Lightness is adjusted by varying k. In theory, any mixture where c = m = y is neutral, but in practice such mixtures are often a muddy brown (see discussion on this topic).

HSL and HSV

Greys result whenever s is 0 or undefined, as is the case when v is 0 or l is 0 or 1

In nature

Ammonites in a wall in Germany

Birds

• The grey peacock-pheasant is the unofficial national bird of Myanmar.

Mammals

• The grey wolf is the largest wild member of the Canidae family.
• A grey horse has dark skin and a coat color that is dark at birth and gradually silvers with age until the hair coat is completely white, but the skin remains dark.
• The grey whale is a whale that travels between feeding and breeding grounds yearly.
• Grey langurs or Hanuman langurs, the most widespread langur of South Asia, are a group of Old World monkeys constituting the entirety of the genus Semnopithecus.

My mother was grey and she did nothing about it.

In popular culture

Grey weather

Environmentalism

• Greys has been used pejoratively by environmentalists to describe technophiles as being those who like granite, concrete and other city materials, as opposed to the term "greens" to describe those in favor of environmentalism.

Ethics

• In a moral sense grey is either used
  • to describe situations that have no clear moral value, or
  • positively to balance an all-black or all-white view (for example, shades of grey represent magnitudes of good and bad).

Ethnography

• Some Nordic people have grey eyes.

Folklore

• In folklore, grey is often associated with goblin folk of several kinds. Scandinavian folklore often depicts their gnomes and nisser in grey clothing. This is partly because of their association with dusk, partly because these races, including elves (see below), often are outside moral standards (black or white).

Gerontology

• The color grey is often associated with aging or the passage of time, likely due in part to the decreased pigment-production of hair follicles in time, corresponding to the greying of human hair. In this context, grey is often used synonymously with "elderly", as in "the grey pound" or "grey power" (when referring to the economic or social influence of the elderly), or as used by groups such as the Gray Panthers.

Journalism

• "The Gray Lady" is the nickname of The New York Times.

Literature

• In J. R. R. Tolkien's works:
  • Gandalf is called the Grey Pilgrim.
  • The Grey Havens
  • The Grey Elves
  • Ered Mithrin, the Grey Mountains. Tolkien chose grey from folklore tradition mentioned above.
  • The Noldor and the Dúnedain typically have grey eyes.
• Rand al'Thor of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is described as having grey eyes.
• In the series The T*Witches, those of magical power are described as having grey eyes.
• In Michael Ende's Momo, the men in grey are malicious spirits who prey on people's time and trick them into "saving" it.
• In Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise, the inventor of Dylar is at first only referred to as Mr. Gray.
• Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two seminal sword-and-sorcery fantasy heroes created by Fritz Leiber.
• The Brenin Llwyd, the eponymous antagonist of The Grey King, by Susan Cooper.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, is a 1950s novel and film about the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business.
• Gray Lensman by E.E. Smith is part of the Lensman series.

Military

• In the American Civil War, Confederate Army uniforms were grey, and the war was sometimes called "The Blue and the Gray".
• The military of Germany used a green-grey shade called feldgrau from 1907 until 1945. The army of East Germany used it until 1990.
• Napoleon Bonaparte is often depicted with a grey riding coat.

Music

• A purposely nonsensical line in Paul Simon's song "I Do It For Your Love": "We were married / On a rainy day / The sky was yellow / And the grass was gray."
• A song from The Kinks Muswell Hillbillies album is titled Here Come the People in Grey.
• An album from the Finnish metal band Sonata Arctica is named The Days of Grays, one of the song on this album is called The Last Amazing Grays
• A song from Biohazard album Urban Discipline is titled Shades Of Grey and it tells a tale of how not everything in the world is black & white and that you should perceive the world in different shades of grey.
• The band Bad Religion has an album and a song titled The Grey Race

Mythology

• The goddess Athena was described as having bluish grey (Greek: γλαυκός, glaukós, literally "owl-like") eyes, hence her epithet γλαυκῶπις, glaukōpis, "owl-eyed".

Nanotechnology

• Grey goo is a hypothetical end of civilization scenario, involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy).

Parapsychology

• It has been claimed that those who are suffering from the mental illness of clinical depression have grey auras.

Philosophy

• A concept that is in a grey area is a concept about which one is unsure what category in which to place it.

Poetry

• Poet George Sterling called San Francisco The Cool, Grey City of Love.

Politics

• Martin Bormann was called the grey eminence because, as the executive secretary to Adolf Hitler, he amassed great power behind the scene, because he was the one who controlled access to the Führer. The phrase originated as a description of François Leclerc du Tremblay, the French monk who served as advisor to Cardinal de Richelieu.
• The National Renaissance Party was an American neo-fascist group led by James Hartung Madole. The party was active from 1949 to 1979. The members of the party were also known as the grey shirts.
• Stalin was known as the "grey blur".

Sexuality

• In the bandana code of the gay leather subculture, wearing a grey bandana means that one is into the sexual fetish of Bondage (BDSM).
• In gay slang, a grey queen is a gay person who works for the financial services industry (this term originates from the fact that in the 1950s, people who worked in this profession often wore grey flannel suits).

Sound engineering

• Grey noise is random noise subjected to a psychoacoustic equal loudness curve (such as an inverted A-weighting curve) over a given range of frequencies, giving the listener the perception that it is equally loud at all frequencies.

Sports

• Baseball uniforms used for away games are often grey. This came about because in the 19th and early 20th century, away teams didn't normally have access to laundry facilities on the road, thus stains were not noticeable on the darker grey uniforms as opposed to the white uniforms worn by the home team.
• Grey is one of the colors used by the Georgetown Hoyas, the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Phoenix Suns.
• On 13 April 1996, Manchester United wore, for only the fifth time, their (then current) grey away shirts when playing Southampton at Southampton's ground, The Dell. At the half time break, with Manchester United unexpectedly trailing 3–0, they changed into another team kit, this time in blue and white. In the second half Manchester United performed better, although only scoring one goal to end the game 3–1 down. It was claimed that Manchester United's poor performance in the first half was down to the players having difficulty seeing their teammates in the grey kit, and that kit was never worn again.

Symbolic language

• In France, to be "grey" (être gris) means to be drunk. Accordingly, to be extremely drunk is to be "black" (être noir).
• In the U.S., the college slang verb to gray was used around 1900 to mean to get drunk.

Television

• Grey is associated with former British Prime Minister John Major. His puppet on the satirical TV show Spitting Image was entirely grey, implying that he was incredibly dull.

UFOs

• In popular UFO conspiracy theory and in science-fiction, intelligent alien humanoids, are often referred to as greys.

See also

• Black-and-white
• Davy's grey
• Grisaille
• Payne's grey
• List of colors

External links

• Three computational biologists’ theory to explain how humans perceive achromatic colors:
• Chart showing a comparison of the achromatic (grey scale) values of the colors on the RYB and RGB color wheels, respectively (the chart is halfway down the webpage):