Lead

How to spell lead

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lead

What does lead mean?

1. verbTo guide, direct, or be in charge of a group or activity.
2. nounA leading position, advantage, or initial clue in an investigation.
3. nounA heavy, soft, dull-grey metallic element used in pipes, weights, and batteries.

Lead in a sentence

• verb

  The senior manager will lead the project from next week.

• noun

  The home team held a narrow lead until the final minute.

• noun

  Old water pipes made of lead were stripped out during the renovation.

• verb

  A quiet trail can lead hikers all the way to the summit.

• noun

  The detective followed a promising lead in the missing-person case.

• noun

  The diver wore a belt weighted with lead to stay underwater.

Where does lead come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling actually hides two separate words. The verb meaning 'to guide or go in front' comes from Old English laedan, meaning 'to cause to go with you', which is related to the noun lad, 'a way or journey'; that older sense of travelling a road is why we still speak of a path that 'leads' somewhere. It is part of a wide Germanic family, with cousins in Dutch leiden and German leiten. The unrelated noun for the soft grey metal comes from a different Old English word, lead, of West Germanic origin, the same source as Dutch lood and German Lot, a word for the metal and for a plumb weight. The two words simply collided on the same spelling, and the metal sense kept its older short vowel while the verb shifted to a long one, which is why the same five letters are said two completely different ways.

How the word is built

• lead (single Old English root; the metal sense and the guiding sense are unrelated homographs)