gray

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Dreary, gloomy, cloudy.

   the era of gray, boring banality and stagnation

2. 2
   adj

   Gray-haired.

   I have already gone gray and lost my looks.

3. 3
   adj

   Old.

   Two hours, whose mighty circle did embrace More time than might make grey the infant world, Rolled thus, a weary and tumultuous space: […]

4. 4
   adj

   Relating to older people.

   the gray dollar

5. 5
   verb

   To turn gray.

   My hair is beginning to gray.

6. 6
   verb

   To turn progressively older, alluding to graying of hair through aging (used in context of the population of a geographic region)

   the graying of America

7. 7
   noun

   A gray wolf

   Caywood holds the rifle which time after time brought down a raging, snarling prairie gray.

8. 8
   noun

   A gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus.

   Log-shaped barnacles become embedded in the hide of the gray.

Etymology

From Middle English gray, from Old English grǣġ, grǣw (“grey”), from Proto-West Germanic *grāu, from Proto-Germanic *grēwaz (“grey”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰreh₁- (“to green, to grow”). Cognate with West Frisian grau (“grey”), Dutch grauw (“grey”), German Low German grau, graag (“grey”), German grau (“grey”), Swedish grå (“grey”), Icelandic grár (“grey”), Latin rāvus (“tawny, grey”), Old Church Slavonic зьрѭ (zĭrjǫ, “to see, to glance”), archaic Russian зреть (zretʹ, “to watch, to look at”), Lithuanian žeriù (“to shine”).