I'm a retired editor with 30+ years experience. I worked mainy in STEM editing, so I didn't have any need to write or edit leads. It's absolutely bizarre to me that journalists would use a four-letter word with the same pronunciation as shorthand for a four-letter word that sounds the same. I'll have to run this past my editors group on Facebook! Thanks for the tip.
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Newsroom editors used it and a bunch of other abbreviations back in the pen-and-paper days to indicate format edits. Hed, dek, lede, nutgraf and subhed are the ones I still see in day-to-day media editor life, but outside of news I don’t encounter them much. Now we just have homophones everywhere 🤪
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