Grey
Grey or gray is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma. 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 700 CE. Grey is the dominant spelling in European and Commonwealth English, while gray is more common in American English; however, both spellings are valid in both varieties of English.
In Europe and North America, surveys show that grey is the color most commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and humility. Only one percent of respondents chose it as their favorite color.
Etymology
Grey comes from the Middle English grai or grei, from the Old English grǣġ, and is related to the Dutch grauw and German grau. There are certain cognates outside Germanic languages; terms such as Spanish, Italian and Medieval Latin griseus are considered Germanic loanwords. The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in 700 CE.The distinction between grey and gray spellings in usual Commonwealth and American English respectively developed the 20th century.
In history and art
Antiquity through the Middle Ages
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, grey was the color of undyed wool, and thus was the color most commonly worn by peasants and the poor. It was also the color worn by Cistercian monks and friars of the Franciscan and Capuchin orders as a symbol of their vows of humility and poverty. Franciscan friars in England and Scotland were commonly known as the grey friars, and that name is now attached to many places in Great Britain.Renaissance and the Baroque
During the Renaissance and the Baroque, grey began to play an important role in fashion and art. Black became the most popular color 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 called grisaille. The painting would first be composed in grey and white, and then the colors, made with thin transparent glazes, would be added on top. The grisaille beneath would provide the shading, visible through the layers of color. Sometimes, the grisaille was simply left uncovered, giving the appearance of carved stone.
Grey was a particularly good background color for gold and for skin tones. It became the most common background for the portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn and for many of the paintings of El Greco, who used it to highlight the faces and costumes of the central figures. The palette of Rembrandt was composed almost entirely of somber colors. 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 red lake color from cochineal or madder. In one painting, the portrait of Margaretha de Geer, 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 some lead white. Over this he put an additional layer of glaze made of mixture of blue smalt, 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". The warm, dark and rich greys and browns served to emphasize the golden light on the faces in the paintings.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Grey became a highly fashionable color in the 18th century, both for women's dresses and for men's waistcoats and coats. It looked particularly luminous coloring the silk and satin fabrics worn by the nobility and wealthy.File:Princess Isabel and Leopoldina 1855 frame removed.png|thumb|Brazilian princesses Leopoldina and Isabel 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 colorful 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 of grisettes. "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 color 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 color of the uniforms of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and of the Prussian 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, and James 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 composer Claude Debussy. In 1894, Debussy wrote to violinist Eugène Ysaÿe describing his Nocturnes as "an experiment in the combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting".
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
In the late 1930s, grey became a symbol of industrialization and war. It was the dominant color of Pablo Picasso's celebrated painting about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica.After the war, the grey business suit became a metaphor for uniformity of thought, popularized in such books as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which became a successful film in 1956.
In the sciences, nature, and technology
Storm clouds
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 airplane, the same clouds look perfectly white, but from the ground the sky looks gloomy and grey.
The greying of hair
The color of a person's hair is created by the pigment melanin, found in the core of each hair. Melanin is also responsible for the color of the skin and of the eyes. There are only two types of pigment: dark or light. Combined in various combinations, these pigments create all natural hair colors.Melanin itself is the product of a specialized cell, the melanocyte, which is found in each hair follicle, from which the hair grows. As hair grows, the melanocyte injects melanin into the hair cells, which contain the protein keratin 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 color. 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 of Science, 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. According to the site of the magazine Scientific American, "Generally speaking, among Caucasians 50 percent are 50 percent grey by age 50." Adult male gorillas also develop silver hair, but only on their backs – see Physical characteristics of gorillas.
Optics
Over the centuries, artists have traditionally created grey by mixing black and white in various proportions. They added a little red to make a warmer grey, or a little blue for a cooler grey. Artists could also make a grey by mixing two complementary colors, such as orange and azure.Today the grey on televisions, computer displays, and telephones is usually created using the RGB color 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 different shades of grey.
In printing, grey is usually obtained with the CMYK color 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 the human eye can detect even a minute amount of color saturation. Adding a small amount of yellow, orange, or red will create a "warm grey". Adding a small amount of green, cyan, blue, or violet will form a "cool grey". When no color is added, the color is "neutral grey", "achromatic grey", or simply "grey". Images consisting wholly of black, white and greys are called monochrome, black-and-white, or greyscale.
; RGB model
; CMYK model
; HSL and HSV models:Achromatic greys have no saturation, so grey is produced by S = 0; 0 < < 1;, for the color or.