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Grey orgray is anintermediate colour betweenblack andwhite. It is a neutral or achromatic colour, meaning that it has nochroma.[2] It is the colour of a cloud-covered sky, ofash, and oflead.[3]
The first recorded use ofgrey as a colour name in the English language was in 700 CE.[4]Grey is the dominant spelling inEuropean and Commonwealth English, whilegray is more common in American English; however, both spellings are valid in both varieties of English.[5][6]
Inantiquity and theMiddle Ages, grey was the colour of undyed wool, and thus was the colour most commonly worn by peasants and the poor. It was also the colour worn byCistercian monks and friars of theFranciscan andCapuchin orders as a symbol of their vows of humility and poverty. Franciscan friars in England andScotland were commonly known as thegrey friars, and that name is now attached to many places in Great Britain.
During the Renaissance and the Baroque, grey began to play an important role in fashion and art. Black became the most popular colour of the nobility, particularly in Italy, France, and Spain, and grey and white were harmonious with it.
Grey was also frequently used for the drawing of oil paintings, a technique calledgrisaille. The painting would first be composed in grey and white, and then the colours, made with thin transparent glazes, would be added on top. The grisaille beneath would provide the shading, visible through the layers of colour. Sometimes, the grisaille was simply left uncovered, giving the appearance of carved stone.
Grey was a particularly good background colour for gold and for skin tones. It became the most common background for the portraits ofRembrandt van Rijn and for many of the paintings ofEl Greco, who used it to highlight the faces and costumes of the central figures. The palette of Rembrandt was composed almost entirely of sombre colours. He composed his warm greys out of black pigments made from charcoal or burnt animal bones, mixed with lead white or a white made of lime, which he warmed with a little redlake colour fromcochineal ormadder. In one painting, the portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1661), one part of a grey wall in the background is painted with a layer of dark brown over a layer of orange, red, and yellow earths, mixed with ivory black and somelead white. Over this he put an additional layer of glaze made of mixture of bluesmalt,red ochre, and yellow lake. Using these ingredients and many others, he made greys which had, according to art historian Philip Ball, "an incredible subtlety of pigmentation".[10] The warm, dark and rich greys and browns served to emphasise the golden light on the faces in the paintings.
Grey became a highly fashionable colour in the 18th century, both for women's dresses and for men's waistcoats and coats. It looked particularly luminous colouring the silk and satin fabrics worn by the nobility and wealthy.
Brazilian princessesLeopoldina andIsabel (seated) wearing grey gowns, c. 1855
Women's fashion in the 19th century was dominated by Paris, while men's fashion was set by London. The grey business suit appeared in the mid-19th century in London; light grey in summer, dark grey in winter; replacing the more colourful palette of men's clothing early in the century.
The clothing of women working in the factories and workshops of Paris in the 19th century was usually grey. This gave them the name ofgrisettes. "Gris" or grey also meant drunk, and the name "grisette" was also given to the lower class of Parisian prostitutes.
Grey also became a common colour for military uniforms; in an age of rifles with longer range, soldiers in grey were less visible as targets than those in blue or red. Grey was the colour of the uniforms of theConfederate Army during theAmerican Civil War, and of thePrussian Army for active service wear from 1910 onwards.
Several artists of the mid-19th century used tones of grey to create memorable paintings;Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used tones of green-grey and blue grey to give harmony to his landscapes, andJames McNeill Whistler created a special grey for the background of the portrait of his mother, and for his own self-portrait.
Whistler's arrangement of tones of grey had an effect on the world of music, on the French composerClaude Debussy. In 1894, Debussy wrote to violinistEugène Ysaÿe describing hisNocturnes as "an experiment in the combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting".[11]
In the late 1930s, grey became a symbol of industrialisation and war. It was the dominant colour ofPablo Picasso's celebrated painting about the horrors of theSpanish Civil War,Guernica.[12]
After the war, the grey business suit became a metaphor for uniformity of thought, popularised in such books asThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), which became a successful film in 1956.[13]
The whiteness or darkness of clouds is a function of their depth. Small, fluffy white clouds in summer look white because the sunlight is being scattered by the tiny water droplets they contain, and that white light comes to the viewer's eye. However, as clouds become larger and thicker, the white light cannot penetrate through the cloud, and is reflected off the top. Clouds look darkest grey during thunderstorms, when they can be as much as 20,000 to 30,000 feet high.
Stratiform clouds are a layer of clouds that covers the entire sky, and which have a depth of between a few hundred to a few thousand feet thick. The thicker the clouds, the darker they appear from below, because little of the sunlight is able to pass through. From above, in an aeroplane, the same clouds look perfectly white, but from the ground the sky looks gloomy and grey.[14]
The colour of a person's hair is created by the pigmentmelanin, found in the core of each hair. Melanin is also responsible for the colour of the skin and of the eyes. There are only two types of pigment: dark (eumelanin) or light (phaeomelanin). Combined in various combinations, these pigments create all natural hair colours.
Melanin itself is the product of a specialised cell, themelanocyte, which is found in eachhair follicle, from which the hair grows. As hair grows, the melanocyte injects melanin into the hair cells, which contain the proteinkeratin and which makes up our hair, skin, and nails. As long as the melanocytes continue injecting melanin into the hair cells, the hair retains its original colour. At a certain age, however, which varies from person to person, the amount of melanin injected is reduced and eventually stops. The hair, without pigment, turns grey and eventually white. The reason for this decline of production of melanocytes is uncertain. In the February 2005 issue ofScience, a team of Harvard scientists suggested that the cause was the failure of the melanocyte stem cells to maintain the production of the essential pigments, due to age or genetic factors, after a certain period of time. For some people, the breakdown comes in their twenties; for others, many years later.[15] According to the site of the magazineScientific American, "Generally speaking, among Caucasians 50 percent are 50 percent grey by age 50."[16] Adult male gorillas also develop silver hair, but only on their backs – seePhysical characteristics of gorillas.
Over the centuries, artists have traditionally created grey by mixing black and white in various proportions. They added a little red to make awarmer grey, or a little blue for a cooler grey. Artists could also make a grey by mixing twocomplementary colours, such asorange andazure.
Today the grey on televisions, computer displays, and telephones is usually created using theRGB colour model. Red, green, and blue light combined at full intensity on the black screen makes white; by lowering the intensity, it is possible to create all the differentshades of grey.
In printing, grey is usually obtained with theCMYK colour model. By using black ink at a lower density than the one needed to print black, all the shades of grey can be created. Grey can also be formed by mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow in a specific proportion, each at a low or moderate density. Usually, both methods are combined.
Most greys have a cool or a warm cast to them, as thehuman eye can detect even a minute amount of colour saturation. Adding a small amount of yellow, orange, or red will create a "warm grey". Adding a small amount of green, cyan, blue, orviolet will form a "cool grey".[17] When no colour is added, the colour is "neutral grey", "achromatic grey", or simply "grey". Images consisting wholly of black, white and greys are calledmonochrome,black-and-white, orgreyscale.
Grey values are produced byC = M = Y = 0; 0 < K < 1, for the colour (C, M, Y, K). Lightness is adjusted by varyingK. In theory, any mixture whereC = M = Y is neutral, but in practice such mixtures are often a muddy brown.
There are several tones of grey available for use withHTML andCascading Style Sheets (CSS) as named colours, while 254 true greys are available by specification of ahex triplet for the RGB value. All are spelledgray, using the spellinggrey can cause errors. This spelling was inherited from theX11 colour list.Internet Explorer'sTrident browser engine does not recognisegrey and renders it green. Another anomaly is thatgray is in fact much darker than the X11 colour markeddarkgray; this is because of a conflict with the original HTML grey and the X11 grey, which is closer to HTML'ssilver. The threeslategray colours are not themselves on the greyscale, but are slightlysaturated towardcyan (green + blue). Since there are an even (256, including black and white) number ofunsaturated tones of grey, there are two grey tones straddling themidpoint in the 8-bit greyscale. The colour namegray has been assigned the lighter of the two shades (128, also known as #808080), due to rounding up.
Until the 19th century, artists traditionally created grey by simply combining black and white.Rembrandt Van Rijn, for instance, usually usedlead white and eithercarbon black orivory black, along with touches of either blues or reds to cool or warm the grey.
In the early 19th century, a new grey,Payne's grey, appeared on the market. Payne's grey is a darkblue-grey, a mixture ofultramarine and black or of ultramarine andsienna. It is named afterWilliam Payne, a British artist who paintedwatercolours in the late 18th century. The first recorded use ofPayne's grey as a colour name in English was in 1835.[18]
Grey is a very common colour for animals, birds, and fish, ranging in size from whales to mice. It provides a natural camouflage and allows them to blend with their surroundings.
The substance that composes the brain is sometimes referred to asgrey matter, or "the little grey cells", so the colour grey is associated with things intellectual. However, the living human brain is actually pink in colour; it only turns grey when dead.
In sound engineering,grey noise israndom noise subjected to anequal-loudness contour, such as an invertedA-weighting curve, over a given range of frequencies, giving the listener the perception that it is equally loud at all frequencies.
Grey is rarely used as a colour by political parties, largely because of its common association with conformity, boredom and indecision. An example of a political party using grey as a colour are the GermanGrey Panthers.
The term "grey power" or "the grey vote" is sometimes used to describe the influence of older voters as avoting bloc. In the United States, older people are more likely to vote, and usually vote to protect certain social benefits, such asSocial Security.[21][22]
Greys is a term sometimes used pejoratively by environmentalists in thegreen movement to describe those who oppose environmental measures and supposedly prefer the grey of concrete and cement.
During theAmerican Civil War, the soldiers of theConfederate Army wore grey uniforms. At the beginning of the war, the armies of the North and of the South had very similar uniforms; some Confederate units wore blue, and some Union units wore grey. There was confusion, and sometimes soldiers fired by mistake at soldiers of their own army. On June 6, 1861, the Confederate government issued regulations standardising the army uniform and establishingcadet grey as the uniform colour. This was (and still is) the colour of the uniform of cadets at theUnited States Military Academy at West Point, and cadets at theVirginia Military Institute, which produced many officers for the Confederacy.
The new uniforms were designed byNicola Marschall, a German-American artist, who also designed the originalConfederate flag. He closely followed the design of contemporary French and Austrian military uniforms.[23] Grey was not chosen for its camouflage value; this benefit was not appreciated for several more decades. The South lacked a major dye industry, though, and grey dyes were inexpensive and easy to manufacture. While some units had uniforms coloured with good-quality dyes, which were a solid bluish-grey, others had uniforms coloured with vegetable dyes made fromsumac orlogwood, which quickly faded in sunshine to the yellowish colour ofbutternut squash.
TheGerman Army wore grey uniforms from 1907 until 1945, during both theFirst World War andSecond World War. The colour chosen was a grey-green calledfield grey (German:feldgrau). It was chosen because it was less visible at a distance than the previous German uniforms, which werePrussian blue. It was one of the first uniform colours to be chosen for itscamouflage value, important in the new age of smokeless powder and more accurate rifles and machine guns. It gave the Germans a distinct advantage at the beginning of the First World War, when the French soldiers were dressed in blue jackets and red trousers. TheFinnish Army also began using grey uniforms on the German model.
During the 19th century, women's fashions were largely dictated by Paris, while London set fashions for men. The intent of a business suit was above all to show seriousness, and to show one's position in business and society. Over the course of the century, bright colours disappeared from men's fashion, and were largely replaced by a black or dark charcoal greyfrock coat in winter, and lighter greys in summer. In the early 20th century, the frock coat was gradually replaced by thelounge suit, a less formal version of evening dress, which was also usually black or charcoal grey. In the 1930s the English suit style was called thedrape suit, with wide shoulders and a nipped waist, usually dark or light grey. After World War II, the style changed to a slimmer fit called the continental cut, but the colour remained grey.[24]
Inbaseball, grey is the colour typically used for roaduniforms. This came about because in the 19th and early 20th century, away teams did not 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.
Ingay slang, agrey queen is a gay person who works for thefinancial services industry. This term originates from the fact that in the 1950s, people who worked in thisprofession often wore grey flannel suits.[25]
In America and Europe, grey is one of the least popular colours; In a European survey, only one per cent of men said it was their favourite colour, and thirteen per cent called it their least favourite colour; the response from women was almost the same. According to one author, "grey is too weak to be considered masculine, but too menacing to be considered a feminine colour. It is neither warm nor cold, neithermaterial orspiritual. With grey, nothing seems to be decided."[26] It also denotes undefinedness andambiguity, as in agrey area.
Grey is the colour most commonly associated in many cultures with the elderly and old age, because of the association with grey hair; it symbolises the wisdom and dignity that come with experience and age. The New York Times is sometimes calledThe Grey Lady because of its long history and esteemed position in American journalism.[27]
Grey is the colour most often associated in Europe and America with modesty.[26]
