lede

A man; a person.

Noun obsolete

  1. A man; a person.
    • & 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; […] - p. 1544, “fflodden ffeilde”, in...
    • Sweet, yes sweet is over (beyond) measure / The marrying for the young lede (people); / Most sweet it is, I say yet (once more), / When it goes with the rede (counsel) of the elders. - 1836, J[oseph] Bosworth,...
    • Gramércy, liegé King, / This is to me a comforting: / I tell you sickerly / For to have land or lede / Or other riches, so God me speed, / It is too much for me. - c. 1870s, “Transition English: From the Conquest to...

Origin

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,...

Forms

lede leed leod

Related

leden

Noun journalism, media

  1. The introductory paragraph or paragraphs of a newspaper, or a news or other type of article; the lead or lead-in.
    • 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. - 1979, J. W. Click, Russell N. Baird, Magazine...
    • "How can Mr. On-line Guy learn to be a journalist if he didn't go through what I went through?" they [newspaper journalists] ask. "I needed the city editor to tell me how to write a graceful sentence, and I was a year...
    • I was thrilled to be in possession of this nugget, which could probably take over the lede of my story. This essentially and truly implicated one of the most respected homicide detectives in Boston, all based on my...

    Synonyms: intro

Origin

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).

Forms

ledes

Related

Article components

Derived

bury the lede lede to kum nulede

Verb

  1. Obsolete spelling of lead (“to guide”).

Origin

See lead.