Grey/Gray |
|
— Common connotations — |
depression, boredom, neutrality, undefinedness, old age, contentment and speed |
— Colour 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 (also spelled gray in the United States, see spelling differences) describes the colours ranging from black to white. These, including white and black, are known as achromatic colours or neutral colours.
Complementary colours are defined to mix to grey, either additively or subtractively, and many colour models place complements opposite each other in a colour 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-colour printing, greys are produced either by the black channel, or by an approximately equal combination of CMY primaries. Images which consist wholly of neutral colours are called monochrome, black-and-white or greyscale.
The first recorded use of grey as a colour name in the English language was in AD 700.[2]
[edit] In colour 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".[3] When there is no cast at all, it is referred to as "neutral grey", "achromatic grey" or simply "grey".
![Grays.svg](https://web.archive.org/web/20110302203646im_/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Grays.svg/310px-Grays.svg.png) |
Warm grey |
Cool grey |
Mixed with 6% yellow. |
Mixed with 6% blue. |
Two colours are called complementary colours if grey is produced when they are combined(in the light spectrum, but as in art it produces brown with paints usually). Grey is its own complement. Consequently, grey remains grey when its colour spectrum is inverted, and so has no opposite, or alternately is its own opposite.
[edit] Web colours
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 colour 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 colour 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" colours 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 colour name "gray" has been assigned the lighter of the two shades (128 also known as #808080), due to rounding up.
HTML Colour Name |
Sample |
|
Hex triplet |
|
(rendered by name) |
(rendered by hex triplet) |
lightgray |
|
|
#D3D3D3 |
gray |
|
|
#808080 |
darkgray |
|
|
#A9A9A9 |
dimgray |
|
|
#696969 |
lightslategray |
|
|
#778899 |
slategray |
|
|
#708090 |
darkslategray |
|
|
#2F4F4F |
|
[edit] Colour coordinates
- RGB
- Grey values result when r = g = b, for the colour (r, g, b)
- CMYK
- Grey values are produced by c = m = y = 0, for the colour (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
- Greys result whenever s is 0 or undefined, as is the case when v is 0 or l is 0 or 1
[edit] In nature
Birds
Mammals
- The grey wolf is the largest wild member of the Canidae family.
- A grey horse has dark skin and a coat colour that is dark at birth and gradually silvers with age until the hair coat is completely white, but the skin remains dark.
- The grey whale is a whale that travels between feeding and breeding grounds yearly.
- The grey seal is a large seal of the family Phocidae or "true seals".
- Grey langurs or Hanuman langurs, the most widespread langur of South Asia, are a group of Old World monkeys constituting the entirety of the genus Semnopithecus.
[edit] In popular culture
- Ethics
- In a moral sense, grey is either used
- to describe situations that have no clear moral value, or
- positively to balance an all-black or all-white view (for example, shades of grey represent magnitudes of good and bad).
- Folklore
- In folklore, grey is often associated with goblin folk of several kinds. Scandinavian folklore often depicts their gnomes and nisser in grey clothing. This is partly because of their association with dusk, partly because these races, including elves, often are outside moral standards (black or white).
- Gerontology
- The colour grey is often associated with aging or the passage of time, likely due in part to the decreased pigment-production of hair follicles in time, corresponding to the greying of human hair.[4] In this context, grey is often used synonymously with "elderly", as in "the grey pound" or "grey power" (when referring to the economic or social influence of the elderly), or as used by groups such as the Gray Panthers.
- Journalism
- Military
- Mythology
- The goddess Athena was described as having bluish grey (Greek: γλαυκός, glaukós, literally "owl-like") eyes, hence her epithet γλαυκῶπις, glaukōpis, "owl-eyed".
- Nanotechnology
- Politics
- Sound engineering
- Sports
- Baseball uniforms used for away games are often grey. 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.
- Grey is one of the colours used by the Georgetown Hoyas, the Ohio State Buckeyes, the New York Giants and the Phoenix Suns.
- Symbolic language
- In France, to be "grey" (être gris) means to be drunk. Accordingly, to be extremely drunk is to be "black" (être noir)[citation needed].
- In the U.S., the college slang verb to gray was used around 1900 to mean to get drunk.[8]
- UFOs
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ W3C TR CSS3 Colour Module, HTML4 colour keywords Archived December 14, 2010 at WebCite
- ^ Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Colour New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 196
- ^ Colour Palette Archived December 14, 2010 at WebCite
- ^ Dominique Van Neste and Desmond J. Tobin, "Hair cycle and hair pigmentation: dynamic interactions and changes associated with aging," Micron, 35, 3 April 2004, pp 193–200.
- ^ Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (June 9, 2004). "Leading nanotech experts put 'grey goo' in perspective". Press release. http://www.crnano.org/PR-IOP.htm. Retrieved 2006-06-17.
- ^ Martin Bormann—The Gray Eminence Archived December 14, 2010 at WebCite
- ^ Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, page 85
- ^ Purdy, Belmont. "More About the Verb 'To Gray'" in The New York Times, January 22, 1902.
[edit] External links