gray

UK/ɡɹeɪ/US/ɡɹeɪ/

nounA12 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,472 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: grays

Gray is the colour between black and white. Rain clouds, wet pavement, an old man's hair.

The spelling is the American one, and British English writes the same colour with an e, which is one of the most reliable ways to tell the two apart on a page. The colour carries a mood with it, so a gray day means a dull one and things looking gray means without hope. It is also the colour of uncertainty, since a gray area is a question the rules do not clearly answer. As a verb it means to go this colour with age.

Definitions of gray

1noungrayThe colour between black and white.A1~27%
“The whole sky was a flat gray.”
2adjectivedullOf that colour, or dull and cheerless.A1~73%
“It was a cold gray morning.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Also accepted in games: grey

Phrases it lives in

a gray area — a situation the rules do not clearly cover

Where it comes from

Proto-Indo-European
*gʰreh₁-
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰreh₁- — to green, to grow
Proto-Germanic
*grēwaz — grey
Proto-West Germanic
*grāu
Old English
grǣġ
Middle English
gray
English, today
gray

From Middle English gray, from Old English grǣġ (West Saxon). The spelling gray reflects the West Saxon vowel development, whereas the variant grey stems from the Anglian form grēġ (through Middle English grey). Further derived from Proto-West Germanic grāu, from Proto-Germanic grēwaz (“grey”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰreh₁- (“to green, to grow”). Cognate with West Frisian grau (“grey”), Dutch grauw (“grey”), German Low German grau, graag (“grey”), German grau (“grey”), Swedish grå (“grey”), Icelandic grár (“grey”), Latin rāvus (“tawny, grey”), cu зьрѭ (“to see, to glance”), archaic Russian зреть (“to watch, to look at”), Lithuanian žeriù (“to shine”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colors, Shapes & Numbers, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

gray in the wild

The gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), also known as the grey whale, is a baleen whale that migrates between feeding and breeding grounds yearly.
Gray whale
The common name of the whale comes from the gray patches and white mottling on its dark skin.
Gray whale
The wolf (Canis lupus; pl.: wolves), also known as the grey wolf or gray wolf, is a canine native to Eurasia and North America.
Wolf
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.
Grey
Black morphs of eastern gray squirrels occur most frequently in the northern portion of its range around the Great Lakes Basin.
Black squirrel

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Definitions of gray

1noungrayThe colour between black and white.A1~27%

“The whole sky was a flat gray.”

2adjectivedullOf that colour, or dull and cheerless.A1~73%

“It was a cold gray morning.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Also accepted in games: grey