Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is greybeard or graybeard?
American spelling is gray, English/UK spelling is grey. Easy way to remember is use "a" for "American" in the American spelling, and "e" (for English) in UK (and presumably the rest of the Commonwealth).
EDIT: There do seem to be a couple of blogs that come up in Google pushing the idea of a difference between US/UK spellings, but that's definitely not something I or most people I know grew up with. Other search results indicate that there is only a modest correlation with location. Perhaps it goes more one-way, with both being in common use in the US but "grey" exclusively preferred in the UK?