Lede

Lede (pronounced leed)

(1) In hot-print typesetting, a deliberate misspelling of “lead”, created to avoid the possibility “lead” being used as text rather than being understood as an instruction.

(2) In journalism, a short summary serving as an introduction to a news story, article or other copy.

(3) In journalism, the main and thus the news item thought most important.

(4) A man; a person (and many related meanings, all obsolete).

Mid twentieth century:  An altered spelling of lead (in the sense used in journalism: “short introductory summary”), used in the printing trades to distinguish it from the homograph lead (in the sense of the “thin strip of type metal for increasing the space between lines of type” which was made of lead (pronounced led (rhyming with “dead”)) and use in this context has always been was rare outside the US.  The historic plural form (Middle English) was lede but in modern use in journalism it’s always ledes.

The historic use has been obsolete since the late sixteenth century.  The Middle English lede & leode (variously: man; human being, person; lord, prince; God; sir; group, kind; race; a people, nation; human race; land, real property, the subjects of a lord or sovereign; persons collectively (and other forms)) were connected to three closely related words (1) the Old English lēod (man; chief, leader; (poetic) prince; a people, people group; nation), (2) the Old English lēoda (man; person; native of a country (and related to lēod)) and (3) the Old English lēode (men; people; the people of a country (which was originally the plural of lēod)).  Lēod was derived from the Proto-West Germanic liud & liudi, from the Proto-Germanic liudiz (man; person; men; people), from the primitive Indo-European hléwdis (man, people) from hlewd- (to grow; people).  The bafflingly large array of meanings of lede in the Middle English is perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase “in all lede” (all the world).  It was related too to the Northumbrian dialectical form lioda (men, people) and was cognate with the German Leute (nation, people) and the Old High German liut (person, people), from the primitive Indo-European root leudh- (people), the source also of the Old Church Slavonic ljudu and the Lithuanian liaudis (nation, people).  Care must be taken if using lede in Sweden.  In the Swedish, lede was from the nominal use (masculine inflection) of the adjective led (evil), used in the synonym den lede frestaren (the evil tempter), understood as “the evil one, the loathsome or disgusting one; the devil, Satan”.

In modern use, lede was a deliberate misspelling of lead, one of a number of words created so they could be used in the instructions given to printers while avoid the risk they might appear in the text being set.  Lede could thus be used to indicate which paragraphs constitute the lede while avoiding any confusion with the word “lead” which might be part of the text to appear in an article.  The other created forms were “dek” (subhead or sub-heading (modified from “deck”)), hed (headline (modified from head)) and kum (used as “lede to kum” or “lede 2 kum” (a placeholder for “lead to come”)).  The technical terms were of some significance when the hot-typesetting process was used for printing.

It’s not clear when lede came into use in the printing trades, the dictionaries which maintain a listing are not consistent and the origin is suggested to date from anywhere between 1950-1976.  The difficulty is determining the date of origin is that the documents on which the words (lede, dek, hed, kum) appeared were ephemeral, created to be used on the day and discarded.  Lede move from the print factory floor to the newsroom to become part of the jargon of journalism, used to describe the main idea in the first few lines of a story, a device to entice a reader to persist (the idea of click-bait nothing new).  In much of the English-speaking world, the word in this context is spelled “lead” but lede remains common in the US.  In either form, it’s entered the jargon, the phrase "to bury the lede" meaning “unwittingly to neglect to emphasize the very most important part of the story (about an editor’s most damning critique) and “if it bleeds it ledes” means a dramatic story, preferably with explicit images, will be on the front page or be the first item of a news bulletin.

Beyond journalism, lede is sometimes used.  An auction site might for example have a “lede photograph”, the one which is though the most tempting and this attract the biggest audience (ie more click-bait).  In general use, it’s probably not helpful and likely only to confuse.  Henry Fowler (1858-1933) would doubtless have included its general use among what in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) he derided as a “pride of knowledge”: “...a very un-amiable characteristic and the display of it should sedulously be avoided” and to illustrated his point he said such vanities included “didacticism, French words, Gallicisms, irrelevant allusions, literary critics’ words, novelty hunting, popularized technicalities, quotations, superiority & word patronage.”  Ones suspects that outside of the print-shop, little would Henry Fowler have tolerated lede.

Others agree, suggesting the old sense from Middle English is now used only as a literary or poetic device and it’s otherwise the sort of conscious archaism of which Henry Fowler disapproved, a thing used only to impress others and beyond that, the modern form should never travel beyond wherever as a form of jargon it makes sense.  Still, there were word nerds who though it might have a future.  The US author William Safire (1929–2009) seemed to find hope in its prospects and even coined “misledeing” which might be tempting for editors searching for novel words with which berate neophyte writers.