Grey or gray is an achromatic or neutral color.
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. Grey is the British, Canadian, Australian, Irish, New Zealand and South African spelling, although gray remained in common usage in the UK until the second half of the 20th century. Gray is the preferred American spelling, although grey is an accepted variant. Gray became the preferred spelling in American English around 1825.
Read more about Grey: In Color Theory, Web Colors, Color Coordinates, Gray in Nature, Gray in Culture
Famous quotes containing the word grey:
“Fretted shadow on stumps
A vanishing husk
Of light . . . grey lumps
Of stone verge the hills with fears.
It is quickly dusk.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“They plough, harrow, reap, dig, make hay, rake, bind grain, thresh, chop wood, milk, churn, do anything that is hard work, physical labor, and who says anything against it?”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)