Lede
adj, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A man; a person. obsolete
"& after to callice hee [Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey] arriued, / like a noble Leed of high degree, / & then to Turwin soone he hyed, / there he thought to haue found King Henery; […]"
- 2 The introductory paragraph or paragraphs of a newspaper, or a news or other type of article; the lead or lead-in. US
"Readers usually see the lead picture and read its caption first, before reading the lede of the article, so the article lede should not be a repetition of the caption."
- 3 the introductory section of a story wordnet
- 1 Obsolete spelling of lead (“to guide”). alt-of, obsolete
- 1 Initialism of live end dead end. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism, not-comparable
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"& after to callice hee [Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey] arriued, / like a noble Leed of high degree, / & then to Turwin soone he hyed, / there he thought to haue found King Henery; […]"
Etymology
From Middle English lede, leode (“man; human being, person; lord, prince; God; sir; group, kind; race; a people, nation; human race; land, real property”) [and other forms], from three closely related words: * Old English lēod (“man; chief, leader; (poetic) prince; a people, people group; nation”); * Old English lēoda (“man; person; native of a country”), related to lēod; and * Old English lēode (“men; people; the people of a country”), originally the plural of lēod. Lēod is inherited from Proto-West Germanic *liudi, from Proto-Germanic *liudiz (“man; person; men; people”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁léwdʰis (“man, people”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁lewdʰ- (“to grow; people”). Doublet of leud. Cognates The English word is cognate with Dutch lieden (“people”), lui(den) (“people”), German Leute (“people”), Norwegian lyd (“people”), Polish lud (“people”), Russian люди (ljudi, “people”), West Frisian lie (“people”).
A deliberate misspelling of lead, originally used in instructions given to printers to indicate which paragraphs constitute the lede, intended to avoid confusion with the word lead which may actually appear in the text of an article. Compare dek (“subhead”) (modified from deck) and hed (“headline”) (from head).
See lead.
Related phrases
More for "lede"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.