Word.ws English Dictionary

bury the lede

bury the lede verb: to begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts.

Verb

bury the lede (third-person singular simple present buries the lede, present participle burying the lede, simple past and past participle buried the lede)

  1. (US, idiomatic) To begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts.
    • The news account started by recounting details of the candidate's appearance and buried the lede by not mentioning his new call for tax reform until the 19th paragraph.

Forms of bury the lede

third-person singular presentburies the lede
present participleburying the lede
past participleburied the lede
pastburied the lede
alternative formbury the lead

Questions about bury the lede

What does bury the lede mean?
Bury the lede means to begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts.
What part of speech is bury the lede?
Bury the lede is a verb.
What is the past tense of bury the lede?
The past tense of bury the lede is buried the lede.

Words near bury the lede in the dictionary

  1. bury
  2. bury one's head in the sand
  3. Bury St Edmunds
  4. bury the hatchet
  5. bury the lead
  6. bury the lede
  7. bury your gays
  8. buryable
  9. buryal
  10. buryals
  11. Buryat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bury the lede (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-bury the lede.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bury the lede.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bury_the_lede. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.