Other forms: leads, led, leading
To lead is to go first and have other people come after you. The guide leads the group up the hill; a teacher leads a class through a poem; you take the dog's lead down off the hook by the door and let it pull you along the pavement.
The word splits in two the moment you say it out loud. Lead the verb rhymes with need, and its past is led, spelled with one e — that swap is the mistake almost everyone makes in writing. Lead the metal rhymes with bed: the heavy grey stuff in old pipes, old paint and the strips between the panes of a church window. Around the verb sits a crowd of nouns that all keep the long sound — a runner has a two-second lead, an actor plays the lead, a detective follows a lead, a salesperson chases leads all week. And lead to is the one you will write most: one small mistake leads to a very large bill.
1verbleadTo go in front so that others follow.~2%
“A guide leads the group up the hill every morning at six.”
synonyms: guide, show the way
2verbchargeTo be in charge of a group, a project or a country.~27%
“She leads a team of eleven and knows every one of their names.”
3verbresultTo have something as its result. Always lead to.~9%
“Cheap repairs lead to expensive ones.”
4nounelementA heavy, soft grey metal, said to rhyme with bed. Poisonous to handle.~53%
“The pipes in that house were still lined with lead.”
5nounmarketingSomebody who has shown enough interest to follow up.~9%
“The stand at the fair produced ninety leads and two sales.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: guide
Two different words that ended up spelled the same. The verb is Old English lǣdan, from a Germanic word meaning to cause someone to go — you do not walk, you make the others walk. The metal is Old English lēad, and — if the Celtic borrowing is right — its trail runs back to *plewd-, a root meaning to flow.
Middle English
led
English, today
lead
From Middle English led. From Middle English led, leed, from Old English lēad (“lead”), from Proto-West Germanic laud (“lead”), possibly borrowed from Proto-Celtic ɸloudom, from Proto-Indo-European plewd- (“to flow”). Cognate with Scots leid, lede (“lead”), frr lud, luad (“lead”), West Frisian lead (“lead”), Dutch lood (“lead”), Low German Lod (“solder, plummet”), German Lot (“solder, plummet, sounding line”), Swedish lod (“solder, plummet”), Icelandic lóð (“a plumb, weight”), Irish luaidhe (“lead”) Latin plumbum (“lead”), Finnish luoti (“bullet”). a doublet of loth. More at flow.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA