leading

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for leading is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈliːdɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,087 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "present participle and gerund of lead".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for leading, with forms such as "elading", "laeding", and "leadding". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 16 confusable-pair relationships, "leaving", "letting", "loading", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English ledinge, ledynge, ledand, ledande, ledende, from Old English lǣdende, from Proto-West Germanic *laidijandī, from Proto-Germanic *laidijandz, present participle of Proto-Germanic *laidijaną (“to lead”), equivalent to lead + -ing. Compare … Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is leading, spelled L-E-A-D-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.