Definition and meaning of grey

Grey
— Common connotations —
depression, blandness, boredom, neutrality, fog, undefinedness, old age, contentment and speed
— Color coordinates —
Hex triplet		#808080
sRGBB	(r, g, b)	(128, 128, 128)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(--°, 0%, 50%)
Source		HTML/CSS[1]
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

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.^[2] 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.^[3] Gray is the preferred American spelling, although grey is an accepted variant.^[4][5] Gray became the preferred spelling in American English around 1825.^[6]

  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.^{[citation needed]} Yellow, orange, and red create a "warm grey". Green, blue, and violet create a "cool grey".^[7] 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 additively. Grey is its own complement.

  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 grey and the X11 grey, which is closer to HTML's "silver". The three "slategray" colors are not themselves on the greyscale, 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.

  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 

Achromatic greys have no hue, so the h code is marked as "undefined" using a dash: -- ; greys also result whenever s is 0 or undefined, as is the case when v is 0 or l is 0 or 1

  See also

• Black
• Black-and-white
• Vin gris (grey wine in French)
• List of colors
• Variations of grey
• White

  References

  External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gray

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