Where the Gray name comes from

Gray goes two ways and both are common. In most Scottish cases it is the colour, cognate with the Old English graeg, and it described somebody's hair. In English, Irish and Norman cases it is a place instead, Graye-sur-Mer in Calvados, whose own name comes from the Late Latin Graecus, meaning a Greek.

There is a French Gray as well, from Gray in Haute-Saone, which traces back through a Gallo-Roman pronunciation to the Latin name Gratius. The two English spellings split long before either became a surname: grey follows the Anglian vowel and gray the West Saxon one.