GREY or GRAY?

Which is correct, the "grey" or "gray" spelling?

Have you often wondered "Am I spelling g-r-e-y correctly...or is it g-r-a-y?". How do you spell the color grey or gray? Well, the answer is they are both correct. There are two acceptable spellings. Gray is used primarily in the United States and other areas that use US English. Grey is used in Great Britain and areas that use UK English.

The only exceptions to these rules are:

1. Proper nouns such as a last name; Earl Grey and Zane Grey would not be spelled Gray and L.H. Gray must be always be spelled Gray.
2. Greyhound as in the dog breed.
3. Food irradiation (quantity of radiation energy absorbed by the food as it passes through the radiation field during processing). 1 Gray = 0.001 kGy = 1 joule of energy absorbed per kilogram of food irradiated.

When all else fails..................

grAy is how it's spelled in America

grEy is how it's spelled in England

"Is it grey or gray?" is likely one of the most frequently asked questions in regard to common misspellings, however there are many other commonly misspelled words related to regional differences. In most cases American spellings seem to be a bit more phonetic.

What is the difference between grey and gray?

According to a very comprehensive color charted provided by Clorford.com (a trusted resource on color swatches) grey and gray are actually two different "color swatches".

According to a survey conducted both in the U.S. and England, many people believe grey is an actual color perceived as the hue of "silver", and gray is a sliding scale of values from black to white.

Gray vs. Grey—Where Does the Difference Come From?

Does your vowel choice really make a lot of difference in the case of the color gray? It doesn’t.

The pronunciation remains the same regardless of the spelling you’re using. In fact, both spellings have the exact same origin.
Both gray and grey come from the Old English word grǽg. Over time, many different spellings of the word developed. The Middle English poem “The Owl and the Nightingale,” which was written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, uses the spelling “greie.” The fourteenth-century translation of the French poem “Roman de la Rose” uses the spelling “greye.” “Graye” can be found in the poem “Piers Plowman” written by William Langland in the second half of the fourteenth century. Examples of the spellings we use today can also be found in Middle English literature.
By the eighteenth century, “grey” had become the more common spelling, even though the legendary lexicographer Samuel Johnson thought that “gray” was a better version. In the nineteenth century, English dictionaries followed Johnson’s cue and prescribed “gray” as the correct version, but to no avail. By the twentieth century, “grey” had become the accepted spelling everywhere except in the United States.

Historical Footnote

According to an interesting and authoritative note in the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling "gray" was championed by Samuel Johnson, English writer and lexicographer and other English lexicographers; but in the twentieth century "grey" became the established spelling in Britain anyway.

Meanwhile, in the United States, "gray" became standard somewhat earlier. Examining two nineteenth-century U.S. dictionaries--Webster's Academic Dictionary (1867) and Webster's Condensed Dictionary (~1897) --and both include entries for "grey" that refer readers to "gray" for the term's definitions. So, what is the difference between grey and gray? On the one hand, this indicates an early preference in the United States (or at least at Merriam-Webster) for "gray"; but on the other, it suggests an incomplete victory, since British spellings such as "labour" and "labelled" don't appear in those dictionaries at all.