Grey

Grey or gray (see spelling differences) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning literally that it is a color "without color". It is the color of a cloud-covered sky, of ash and of lead.

The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700.Grey is the dominant spelling in European and Commonwealth English, although gray remained in common usage in the UK until the second half of the 20th century.Gray has been the preferred American spelling since approximately 1825, although grey is an accepted variant.

In Europe and the United States, surveys show that grey is the color most commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and modesty. Only one percent of respondents chose it as their favorite color.

Etymology

Grey comes from the Middle English grai or grei, from the Anglo-Saxon graeg, and is related to the German grau. The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700.

Color

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space colors can be identified numerically by their coordinates.

Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).