I’ve always thought of it as “grEy” is English and “grAy” is American.
Grey is colour and gray is color
I like spelling it grey because it looks better
I think of grey as having a slight blue tinge, like grey skies
Versus gray is made of only (e.g.) black and white paint.
But I know there’s no reason for that distinction and ultimately they’re interchangeable.
Mostly I’m just curious how I got this idea of a slightly bluer grey and if anyone else has a similar mental association.
Interesting! There is a linguistic phenomenon that synonyms differentiate their meanings because we tend to assume that different words have different meanings. This happens both on the individual and collective level. Funny that it even works for different spellings in your case! Maybe you encountered the one in a specific context and since than associate it
For me it’s always been Grey: cool (blue/black tones) Gray: warm (brown/orange tones)
I prefer spelling it with an ‘e’ so I always do that (probably because my name has two common spellings, one with an A and the other with an E, and mine is the latter).
But if forced to identify which is which color-wise, I’d say “grey” has cool undertones while “gray” has warm undertones. Really no reason to think that, but it’s right in my brain.
Reyali, more like Geigh-ly! Huht huht
Felt this way my whole life about low-saturation blues and also gre/ay… discovered I have something going on in my left eye that doesn’t really see greens all that well. Found this out over a rollicking argument over my favorite gray coat which obv, was actually kinda greenish
Other way around.
CSS has solved this issue years ago
#666666
And Gary is the name of Spongebob’s snail
🧐
I always forget how cute their little island english is with all the extra letters and fun ways they mutate loan words!
Loan words? Dude, you’re loaning the entire language.
Languages are the original open source and will never stop forking right off however enough people form and propagate them, dude
You sound like a candidate for a book I enjoyed: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language
One’s an alien, the other is also an alien but spelled differently.
I frequently confuse the two when I’m not thinking, or my browser has defaulted to the colonial spellchecker.
colonial
This could apply to either spelling.
I pronounce the british word as Co-lour-ur
Colauer and armauer.
