Wednesday, June 1, 2011

A very important question for you:

Gray or Grey?

6 comments:

  1. Both. Gray is metallic, corporate, and dull. A battleship would be gray. Grey is soft and calming, like the undersides of clouds. Doves might be grey.

    Yes, I realize this is ridiculously subjective.

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  2. I prefer grey, but I feel in the minority in the US. It feels like gray is more common here. I may have the wrong impression, but it seems "grey" is more common in British English. Obviously I don't correct either, though I recommend consistency.

    I've never seen a distinction based on any logic or attribution.

    It reminds me much of "disk" or "disc." Way back in the day, I did a fair bit of programming on Hewlett-Packard supermini computers. They would refer to storage as being "disk" if the medium was magnetic or "disc" if the medium was optical. I suppose that might be there was no arguing with Philips on the "Compact Disc" media format.

    Wow, this was useful, wasn't it?

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  3. Aw, you beat me to disc vs disk. That was going to be some other week. It's an interesting distinction you make there, though, with magnetic vs digital.

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  4. I find gray hard to deal with, mainly because the "a" to me has a yellow/orange tone to it, so the visual appearance of the written word conflicts with the visual image it is trying to create. The "e" is more blue/green, and says what it means better. I like the battleship versus dove distinction above - I can completely see how that works.

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  5. I prefer American spellings in America, so I prefer gray. My Aunt married a Jamaican with the last name Grey, though, so I don't have anything against the spelling itself.

    I wonder if our spelling is original, and if the Brits changed theirs subsequently. It's happened with plenty of words. The etymology is of Germanic origin, grau.

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  6. Britain and the Commonwealth use "grey". As with "they", "prey" and "whey".

    It was probably Noah Webster who changed it for the USA.
    Whenever I see "gray", I "see red". Grrrr.

    Remember, we also now have fifty shades of grey !

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