Somewhere, recently, I read the term “lede” in the course of an article, which some web pages define as “the lead paragraph of a story, spelled phonetically so it’s not confused with ‘lead’ the weighting between lines or with the metal ‘lead.’”
The funny thing is, the only relevant entry in the OED is “lede: obsolete variant of lead.” That usually means that ‘lede’ is extremely old and not worth talking about. See also Random House’s word of the day for 2000/11/28. Random House says
The spelling “lede” was not invented by journalists. This spelling (and several other variants) was used for all meanings of the noun and verb up through the 1500s; the spelling “leade” or “lead” starts appearing at this time.
Therefore I believe “lede” should not be talked about today, because it’s totally obsolete and should not have been used in the last 500 years; it’s like saying “mine eyen.” Alternatively the OED should have something descriptive to say about “lede”. (I also checked the “lead” entries to see if “lede” were used in the examples, but I didn’t see any.)
“Lede” is used today. See