Leading

How to spell leading

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce leading

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does leading mean?

1. adjectiveMost important, most successful, or in the front position.

Leading in a sentence

• She is the leading candidate for the new management role.

• The firm became the leading supplier of office furniture in the region.

Where does leading come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday sense traces back to the Old English verb lǣdan, meaning 'to cause to go, to guide along a way', which itself grew from a Germanic root tied to the idea of travel and a path. From the act of guiding came the figurative sense of being foremost or in front, and the present participle 'leading' settled into use as an adjective for whatever is chief or most important. The unrelated printing sense comes from a completely different 'lead', the soft grey metal, whose Old English name was lēad; in traditional typesetting, thin strips of that metal were inserted between lines of type to space them out, and that spacing kept the name 'leading'. The two words look identical on the page but are pronounced differently, the guiding sense rhyming with 'feeding' and the metal sense rhyming with 'wedding'. This shared spelling with split pronunciation is the only real trap, since the letters themselves are straightforward.

How the word is built

• lead (to guide; or the metal lead)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)