When I first started writing HTML, I would set colours using the english colour names, for example color="red" or color="white" and this worked well for my needs.
However, I would always get an odd result when I tried to set the colour grey. Turns out, I didn't spell very well (I was pretty young at the time, though still spell atrociously).
<font color="gray">
And the colour would come out green. What?
I quickly realised my spelling error but wondered why things ended up green. I decided what was happening was that the interpreter read the colour name up until the first invalid character (in this case resulting in "gr"), then chose the closest match. Green would be before grey in alphabetical order and... voila!
I see now the solution was simply that gray was interpreted as 00 a0 00. Another life mystery solved!