The same color can have different and even opposite meanings, depending on its context.

The color gray can be a metaphor, an indicator of mood, and reflective of political and moral ambiguity.

The gray zone is an area of non-transparency and suggests illegality and rule-breaking.

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world,” begins Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic nightmarish novel, The Road. Father and son were “looking for anything of color.” “The shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing stretched across the waste.”

Though hardly apocalyptic, L. Frank Baum's original 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, paints a vista similarly devoid of color in its first chapter. The house is dull and gray, as is the prairie on every side, the burnt grass, and Aunt Em, whose eyes lost their sparkle “and left them a sober gray,” and Uncle Henry too. Only her dog Toto made Dorothy laugh and "saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings.” Kansas was gray, gray, gray.

"Every colour produces a distinct impression on the mind, and thus addresses at once the eye and feelings. Hence it follows that colour may be employed for certain moral and aesthetic ends," writes Goethe, in his classic theory on color.

People "systematically and reliably" associate color with emotion, studied under the rubric of synesthesia (D'Andrade and Egan.) This connection is seen across cultures and historical time periods (Jonauskaite and Mohr.)

Some of these connections are universal and may have "strong roots in evolution," such as the blackness of night associated with fear, while other emotions, such as envy or jealousy, are more culture-based and more variable (Hupka et al.)

The understanding and communication about color may be affected by someone's language, as well as the physical environment (Lindsay and Brown). Defining color for a dictionary can be particularly challenging........

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