Leading, Leeding, or Lehding?

June 4, 2004 7:42 AM

How does one pronounce "leading," the term in printing for space between lines of type? "Leeee," or "Leh?"
posted by brownpau to writing & language (11 comments total)

leh
posted by btwillig at 7:43 AM on June 4, 2004

ledding
posted by skylar at 7:45 AM on June 4, 2004

Forgot to say... it's something to do with the bits of lead that printing press people put between the lines to space them out.
posted by skylar at 7:46 AM on June 4, 2004

it's something to do with the bits of lead that printing press people put between the lines to space them out

Not so much 'something to do with' as 'actually is' ;-)
posted by i_cola at 7:48 AM on June 4, 2004

Just FYI, the on-line American Heritage® has free pronunciation.
posted by milovoo at 8:00 AM on June 4, 2004

Thanks, folks. And thanks, milovoo; I'll be using that a lot more than Dictionary.com from now on.
posted by brownpau at 8:09 AM on June 4, 2004

A lot of the terms we still use today in typesetting come from those old days of hot-metal; for example, leading, (pronounced "ledding" - the spacing between lines of type) is called that because the spacing was created by putting strips of lead between the rows of characters.

(from this short history of type)
posted by mathowie at 8:32 AM on June 4, 2004

And you can come and see me set actual leading in my garage if you're ever in Sacramento. How exciting!
posted by luriete at 10:00 AM on June 4, 2004

Is there any practical difference in meaning between 'leading' and 'line-height' (as used in CSS)?
posted by normy at 10:55 AM on June 4, 2004

I don't know about CSS specifically, but leading is the space between the lines, and those lines can be any height. I can have lines 9pt high, but with 20pt leading there's another 11pts of space between the lines. Does that make sense?
posted by bonaldi at 10:57 AM on June 4, 2004

Yes, I think so. In that case I'm assuming that if line-height were 150%, for example, then the leading would be 50%. In print production I suspect they don't use % relative units, however, but hopefully you see what I mean.
posted by normy at 11:10 AM on June 4, 2004