lede
/liːd/
"lede" is a 4-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“lede” is an uncommon English word, ranked #76,937 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #76,937
- frequency rank, English
- 4
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A man; a person.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lede |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /liːd/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #76,937 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “lede” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for lede is 4 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /liːd/. Corpus data places it at rank #76,937 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A man; a person.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for lede, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lede, leode (“man; human being, person; lord, prince; God; sir; group, kind; race; a people, nation; human race; land, real property”) [and other forms], from three closely related words: * Old English lēod (“man; chief, leader; (poetic)… The correct English form is lede, spelled L-E-D-E.
Definition
- 1A man; a person.
Etymology
From Middle English lede, leode (“man; human being, person; lord, prince; God; sir; group, kind; race; a people, nation; human race; land, real property”) [and other forms], from three closely related words: * Old English lēod (“man; chief, leader; (poetic) prince; a people, people group; nation”); * Old English lēoda (“man; person; native of a country”), related to lēod; and * Old English lēode (“men; people; the people of a country”), originally the plural of lēod. Lēod is inherited from Proto-West Germanic *liudi, from Proto-Germanic *liudiz (“man; person; men; people”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁léwdʰis (“man, people”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁lewdʰ- (“to grow; people”). Doublet of leud. Cognates The English word is cognate with Dutch lieden (“people”), lui(den) (“people”), German Leute (“people”), Norwegian lyd (“people”), Polish lud (“people”), Russian люди (ljudi, “people”), West Frisian lie (“people”).
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “lede”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is L-E-D-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /liːd/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.