Try it:
This is typed in grey.
Gray, on the other hand, works fine:
This is typed in gray.
The American Heritage Dictionary recognizes grey. But the board doesn’t.
This post brought to you by the gray’pist.
And the colour of my username is black, just in case some one feels the need to bring that up.
It’s not a board issue. It’s a browser issue. I’m using Netscape, and they look the same to me - they both look gray. I assume you’re on Internet Explorer, and I assume Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize the keyword “grey”.
There are 16 defined HTML color keywords. They are: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. The behavior of a conforming browser is undefined for the tag <font color=“grey”>, just as it is for <font colour=“blue”>.
Understand that a heck of a lot of thought went into these specs. I’m sure the debate over whether “grey” should be reserved to be identical to “gray” has lasted a loooong time, and still continues.
This is why I use hexadecimal RGB color codes in my webpages. These are recognized and handled equally well by all browsers (including the nefarious WebTV).
Apparently this is a platform issue too.
Viewing the OP in IE 5.x for Mac, Grey was not gray or green. It was black.
Then I loaded it in Safari, Apple’s proprietary browser and lo and behold, grey was gray. Or grey. Whichever.
Mozilla, incidentally, does indeed render grey as gray.
oh, and Q.E.D.: the problem with hexadecimal coding is that most browsers will only correctly render the ones that correspond to the reserved keywords. If this weren’t the case, you’d see a lot more people using hex colors, I’m sure.
I don’t know what you mean by “most browsers”, but if you mean what it sounds like, that’s just not right. If instead you mean “enough browsers to worry about”, then it’s possible. But you do see hex colors a lot. The SDMB page colors are all stated in hex. The purple stripe at the top, for instance, is #EEEEFF on #8080A6, and neither of these correspond to any of the reserved words.
Which means that all of those “what color is your username” threads and the like are browser-dependent. When a browser sees something called a color that it doesn’t recognize, it has to make some sort of guess. It so happens that several of the common browsers make the same guesses, but this isn’t a standard, so don’t rely on it.
Awww … and I was tickled pink 
when both my User Name (Shrinking Violet) and my real name (Julie) showed up as the same shade of (sorta) violet … 
Julie