This drives me nuts when I see it done wrong, but it’s actually kind of complicated because English is orthographically deranged.
Lead (/liːd/) [verb, present tense]: to guide, etc. I asked them to lead us in a rousing revolutionary anthem.
Led (/led/) [verb, past tense]: as above, but past tense. Later, we were led to a blank concrete wall.
Lead (/led/) [noun]: A soft, poisonous metal. Bullets are most often made of lead.
Just to make it confusing…
Lead (/liːd/) [noun]: kind of like “leader”. Officer Johnson was our lead on this operation. (Note: it also means “leash”; e.g., I clipped the lead to Bowser’s collar.)
Lede (/liːd/) [noun]: The first bit of a news story, often the first sentence. I didn’t read the full article, but the lede suggested the protesters were decimated by police.
Leeds [proper noun]: A Town in England. Leeds is the worst place to stage peaceful protests.
And finally…
LED (ell ee dee) [noun, abbr.]: Abbreviation for light-emitting diode. For the love of any gods you might believe in, fucking capitalize it. Electronics hobbyists I’m looking in your direction.
More Examples
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Wrong: I was lead into the woods by a stranger.
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Right: I was led into the woods by a stranger.
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Wrong: The lead in an ad about cheap bulk led lead me to lede my leed dog to Leides on her led lede.
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Right: The lede in an ad about cheap bulk lead led me to lead my lead dog to Leeds on her LED lead.
(The last example is stupidly confusing, but it was fun to write.)
I feel like native speakers should read this, they are the number one transgressor when it comes to their/there/they’re and other similar sounding words (homonyms?), as well as “payed” and other creative transcriptions.
for the rest of us it’s damn near impossible to mix these up.
edit: I kinda sound like an asshole; wasn’t meant to be “I’m better than you” (add than/then to the list), more like “here’s my perspective”, no offense was intended.
This one’s tricky. The comma splice in the first sentence is jarring, but recently people seem to absolutely love them despite being wrong. And let’s not linger too long on the ‘damn’ which should be ‘damned’.
I’m not saying it’s imperfect: I’m saying if you miss what I find obvious, maybe their miss of what you find obvious could be easier to understand.
For me, aside from ‘emails’, and the ‘nounification’ of nouns like ‘ask’, ‘spend’, and ‘verbification’ of ‘effort’ – effort the ask to reduce the spend, Dave – I have a general worry that we’re marching towards Idiocracy because LaNgUaGeEvOlVeS and it seems a Parisian-style language police is strongly indicated.