Grace is the decision of a greater party to favour a lesser one who has no claim on that favour.
In Hebrew, the key word is chen, a noun tied to the verb chanan, to show favour. It describes something you find in someone's eyes, not something you feel in your chest. Noah finds chen with God; Moses asks to find chen so God will keep travelling with Israel. It is directional, from a stronger party to a weaker one, and it is not owed.
Greek widens the picture. Charis covers favour, gift, and plain thanks, all from one root. Paul takes this ordinary word for a kindness someone does you and loads it with the whole shape of the gospel: God's unearned rescue of people who cannot earn it. The same root gives charisma, a gift given rather than deserved, and turns up in everyday thank-yous throughout the New Testament.
Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
Noah 'found grace' (chen) in God's eyes, the classic Old Testament use of the word.
Then the LORD passed in front of Moses and called out: “The LORD, the LORD God, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness,
God describes his own character as 'gracious,' the adjective built from the same Hebrew root.
The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The Word is 'full of grace and truth,' charis paired with the Old Testament language of covenant faithfulness.
For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God,
Paul's fullest statement that salvation comes 'by grace,' unearned and not from human effort.
English translations, from the King James Version onward, render charis as "grace" almost every time it appears in the New Testament, which is why the word feels like a distinctly Christian technical term. Chen, its Old Testament cousin, is usually rendered "favour" instead, and only surfaces as "grace" a handful of times, such as Noah finding "grace in the eyes of the LORD." The effect is that English readers meet one idea under two names and often miss that it is the same idea.
People often hear "grace" as a soft, general feeling of warmth or leniency, something like being nice. In both Hebrew and Greek it is closer to a specific act: a superior choosing to favour someone who has no right to expect it. The popular preacher's acronym "God's Riches At Christ's Expense" is a memory trick, not an etymology; the word itself never breaks down that way.
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