Lead and Led

Lead and Led

This is something that has been showing up more in my editing work. It’s curious because I don’t remember seeing any confusion on this ten or twenty years ago.

If you look at read and read (I will read this; I have read that), you see how the spelling stays the same but the pronunciation changes. We expect lead to follow the same pattern, but it doesn’t. The past tense of lead — led — is spelled how it sounds. Perhaps this is because lead (pronounced led) is a metal and was already taken (and red is a color).

Trick to Remember
Try to remember this sentence: 
He was led to a dark alley where he was shot full of lead.