Reading This You Might See Red

You can lede a horse to water…

I recently ran into the use of the word lead when led was warranted. In response to my suggesting the misspelling, the person maintained that lead spells lead (short e as in red) where I had read it as a long e (as in reed).

In a way she was right, because the “comparatively soft, malleable, bluish-grey metal (symbol Pb) is spelled that way. Only she was not talking about the metal, she was talking about the past-tense of the word that means to guide in direction, course, action or opinion. But the past tense of that is spelled led.

How did we end up in this confusion?

The verb lead comes from Old English, so it is very old in the sense of guiding. Originally spelled lædan, it has long been a part of English. Its noun use (the action of leading) appeared in English in the early 1200s. The verb use meaning “to be in first place” is from the late 1300s. The noun meaning “the front or leading place” is from the 1560s, although Samuel Johnson characterized this sense as being low and despicable. The noun form of the verb can also mean “play the first card”, a sense it has had since 1742, or “star in a theater production”, a sense it has had since 1831.

The noun meaning the bluish-grey metal also comes from Old English, but the word from which it came is lead. The reduction in the use of the digraph æ is the source of confusion between the noun and the verb.

Why is the past tense of the verb lead spelled differently, without the letter a? One source suggested that “verbs share a common system of inflectional morphology with one another.” Maybe that clears it up for you but I am not sure what it means. I have checked numerous sources, and while lead is an irregular verb (regular would be lead/lead/leading) it may be influenced by words like bleed, the past tense for which is bled. To try to avoid confusion with the noun lead the past tense of the verb that is a homophone is spelled differently. Unfortunately, like so many things in life, attempts to avoid confusion only create new confusion. I hope that clears it up a little.

I mentioned above that Pb is the symbol for lead. After I asked myself “Why?” a little research led me (and it will lead you, too) to the Latin word plumbum, which is the Latin word for the metal lead. It is the source word for the word-formation prefix plumbo- and in the adjective plumbic which since 1799 has described something that has been combined with the metal lead.

Plumbus is also the source of the word plumb, the lead weight hanging from a string that is used to show a vertical line. While plumb has (and plumbs have) been used since the early 1300s, the original noun has also gained adjective and adverb meanings as well, and now when something is perfectly straight/vertical is referred to as plumb.

And then there’s lede. In the lede to this post I used lede. Lede is the alternative spelling of lead (as in reed) that has been in use in journalism since 1965, according to etyomonline.com. It refers to the opening or introductory section of a story. Who says journalists have no sense of humor?

Now that you have read this you might see red. (Read/reed/red next week.)