[6] In Europe and North America, surveys show that gray is the color most commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and modesty.

[5] The distinction between grey and gray spellings in usual Commonwealth and American English respectively developed c. the 20th century.

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.

Black became the most popular color of the nobility, particularly in Italy, France, and Spain, and grey and white were harmonious with it.

The painting would first be composed in grey and white, and then the colors, made with thin transparent glazes, would be added on top.

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.

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".

[10] The warm, dark and rich greys and browns served to emphasize the golden light on the faces in the paintings.

"Gris" or grey also meant drunk, and the name "grisette" was also given to the lower class of Parisian prostitutes.

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 color – what a study in grey would be in painting".

It was the dominant color of Pablo Picasso's celebrated painting about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica.

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.

Today the grey on televisions, computer displays, and telephones is usually created using the RGB color model.

In printing, grey is usually obtained with the CMYK color model, using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Grey is produced either by using black and white, or by combining equal amounts of cyan, magenta, and yellow.

Most greys have a cool or warm cast to them, as the human eye can detect even a minute amount of color saturation.

Images consisting wholly of black, white and greys are called monochrome, black-and-white, or greyscale.

[18] Grey is a very common color for animals, birds, and fish, ranging in size from whales to mice.

Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario, also known as ecophagy: out-of-control self-replicating nanobots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves.

Buddhist monks and priests in Japan and Korea will often wear a sleeved grey, brown, or black outer robe.

Grey is rarely used as a color by political parties, largely because of its common association with conformity, boredom and indecision.

It was one of the first uniform colors to be chosen for its camouflage 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.

In the early 20th century, the frock coat was gradually replaced by the lounge suit, a less formal version of evening dress, which was also usually black or charcoal grey.

After World War II, the style changed to a slimmer fit called the continental cut, but the color remained grey.

The New York Times is sometimes called The Grey Lady because of its long history and esteemed position in American journalism.