Talk:lede

Journalism usage
The following debatable usage has been moved here in the absence of verification.

lede (plural ledes)


 * 1) The opening or leading paragraph of a news story, which usually presents the key elements of the story. An alternate spelling is "lead" (rhymes with heed), which has other meanings as well. Using lede not only clarifies the meaning, but also avoids confusion with lead (rhymes with head), which is a typesetting term.

See also Wikipedia article on news style and structure. Eclecticology 19:23, 13 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, it is used that way, and a quick internet search confirms it. Journalists revived the 15th century spelling so that the typesetters could easily differentiate between "the text of this story starts here" and "give me a blank line here."  A few traditionalists still use the archaic spelling, for essentially the same reasons that some of them mark the end of their stories with -30- 66.124.70.107 18:24, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Requests for verification - kept
Kept. See archived discussion of February 2008. 07:01, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Journalistic meanings of lead
A journalist has to contend with three possible meanings of non-metallic lead:
 * 1) idea or potential source for a good story
 * 2) the first sentence or paragraph for the story
 * 3) the main front-page story.

This could lead, in principle, to a reporter asking an editor: "could you keep any hint about how I got my lead(1) out of the lead(2) of the lead(3)?" At least 2 and 3 would come up at the editor's desk. The spelling distinction seems useful.

Adding the now-mostly-dated printers' senses of the homographic metal term, there is great potential for confusion.

I have not seen the 4-way confusion potential here hypothesised mentioned elsewhere. Anyone in the field have any thoughts, experiences, facts, or references? DCDuring TALK 11:23, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

A further reference: NYT "On Language DCDuring TALK 11:39, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Lede does not appear in any journalism style books or textbooks until 1959, (see Lead Paragraph) and through the 1960's & 70's it's very sporadic (and was even omitted in several post 1959 versions). Here's the actual 1927 article cited in the above NY Times article as its source for "Lede" - a Nebraska elementary schoolteacher's take on how copywriters work. Hardly a ringing endorsement of a universal copywriter term from days of yore. This is just yore. Lexlex (talk) 22:01, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

RFV discussion: July–August 2021
I am wondering whether (etymology 1) should properly be regarded as having survived out of Middle English into modern English. (Our Middle English entry is at .) We have one 1650 quotation for sense 1, and the OED has one quotation for the same sense from the  dated a. 1650 (which is the date of transcription; the original source material is older and perhaps the date is not accurately known). I suspect the two 19th-century quotations for sense 2 are actually of much older texts. All other quotations in the OED predate 1500. I don't think the 2012 quotation in our entry from ''Yahoo! Canada Answers'' can be regarded as reliable or durably archived.

I also note that sense 4 ("Tenements; holdings; possessions") does not appear in the OED. The entry has been nominated for WOTD. — SGconlaw (talk) 17:38, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * We also appear to have a duplicate ME entry at . IMHO, the ME entry should really be at ; I'll move it there . Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 00:48, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The two ME entries have been combined and moved to . I've investigated the two 19th c. quotes you mentioned:
 * The Bosworth quote given could count as a cite; it's a translation of a 1600s Frisian song (Bosworth doesn't appear to specify what dialect). The original is given as well; I've reproduced it here:
 * "Swíet, ja swíet is 't, oer e míete 'T Boáskien fóar 'e jonge lie"
 * As a reminder, here's Bosworth's translation/gloss:
 * "Sweet, yes sweet is over measure The marrying for the young lede"
 * However, I lean towards not counting it. lede is almost definitely used used to explain the form of (West?) Frisian lie here; there's little chance it's a genuine translational choice.
 * The Morely quote is from his edition of the ME lay Sir Cleges. His edition can safely be discounted, as it appears to fundamentally be a updated-spelling edition of the ME text rather than a proper translation, despite the fact that it idiosyncratically deviates from the mss. in some places.
 * Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 11:52, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I think the Bosworth quote could be counted. Although it's a translation of a cognate (?) Frisian word, he could have chosen something completely different like man or person. But we'd still need at least two more genuine post-1500 quotations (and three for each of the other senses) to show that the word has survived into modern English. That seems like a big ask, though to be fair I've not attempted to do so. — SGconlaw (talk) 13:20, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
 * My point was that it's not really a normal translation; he used it to gloss the Frisian form, not because it was actually a current word in his vocabulary. However, in the absence of cites, this is a irrelevant issue.
 * I'm well aware of what WT:CFI requires; I just spent a good while trying to find more uses on EEBO. However, all the searching through hundreds of instances of leed, lede, and leod has left me empty-handed (though me missing something isn't impossible). The experience has left me firmly convinced that // isn't attestable.
 * It's also worth noting the circumstantial evidence. By c.1400, seems to've been reduced to a dialectal poetic affectation; it appears to've been basically nonexistent in ME prose. It isn't in Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, or Malory. None of this makes it likely that it would've survived into ModE (it does seem to have survived into Middle Scots, though). Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 14:23, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Great work! — SGconlaw (talk) 14:27, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
 * will you be transferring whatever is useful from the modern English sense over to the Middle English entry, or shall I just go ahead and remove the entire modern English sense? — SGconlaw (talk) 17:24, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I've already put what I thought was needed at the ME entry; anything that I've forgot can be recovered through the edit history. Hazarasp (parlement · werkis) 05:29, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

RFV-resolved Kiwima (talk) 00:33, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

that which should be the lede
Seems to me another sense of lede (regardless of spelling) is "that which should be in the opening paragraph," or the qualities of what should be in the opening paragraph. Consider, if the lede is buried, it's not in the opening paragraph, but it's still the lede. (considering the alternate sense of the word meaning "a man", perhaps the lede is the true Scotsman ;) 2603:8001:D300:A631:0:0:0:1D29 19:03, 2 August 2022 (UTC)