gray area

noun

: an area or situation in which it is difficult to judge what is right and what is wrong

There are no gray areas in the rules.

a legal gray area

Examples of gray area in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

And so Hamid, who was formerly a literature professor in Aleppo, starts hanging about on campus, tailing his suspect and straying ever deeper into the gray area between the righteous search for justice and all-out vigilantism. —Jessica Kiang, Variety, 17 May 2024

How people can be a lot of different things and there’s a lot more gray area than black and white. —David Browne, Rolling Stone, 15 May 2024

The agency’s difficulty in keeping up with Trump’s maneuvers, experts said, showed that this gray area of tax law was too easy to exploit. —Paul Kiel, Fortune, 11 May 2024

The casino-like slot machines have proliferated across the state in recent years at gas stations, truck stops, and fraternal organizations and exist in a legal gray area. —Anna Sago and, Kansas City Star, 2 May 2024

The housing authority sits in a regulatory gray area. —Journal Sentinel, 22 Apr. 2024

But those narratives are rarely true, and most situations fall into a gray area. —David Oliver, USA TODAY, 11 Apr. 2024

And still others operate in a gray area created by the national trend toward decriminalization, which has reduced risks and increased rewards associated with black-market marijuana. —Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, 22 Mar. 2024

That leaves countries like Brazil in a kind of do-everything gray area, said Mercedes Bustamante, a professor and ecologist at the University of Brasília, and a member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, an independent group of scientists. —Max Bearak, New York Times, 13 Mar. 2024