LEDs and the correct pronunciation

Question

The LED is quickly becoming a standard light source alternative to incandescent lights, when speaking to others, I have always pronounced any reference to LED as the acronym "L E D", but increasingly I have heard others refer to LED as "lead".

Staff at large box stores often use the "lead" reference, and several of my family have also used the word "lead" in reference to LED.

What I find interesting is that LED's have been around since the 1960's and were always referred to as an acronym. Anyone who studied electrical engineering in school would not use "lead" in a sentence.

Still times have changed and "lead" is increasingly being used.

Is it correct to use the word "lead" to refer to LED?

Answer 1

I'm from Poland where I studied electronics and I say LED as in lead, but we don't have any other word(s) to mix it up with, whereas you have lead and led in English. I have noticed people pronounced it as acronym only.

Answer 2

Setting aside the question of "correct" pronunciation, we can look at actual usage and draw some conclusions. Although this is a question about pronunciation, we are lucky in that we can look at written usage to get clues about pronunciation: if someone writes "an LED" we can assume they would have used the spelling pronunciation, and if they write "a LED" we can assume they would have used the word pronunciation.

A quick perusal at Google Ngrams shows that "an LED" is more commonly used, so the spelling pronunciation’s correctness is not in question. However, we can look at how common do we find "a LED", indicating a likely use of the word pronunciation

We see that since the 1980s, when the term came into wide use, about 20% of usages have held pretty steadily with the word pronunciation.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, not a lot. The spelling pronunciation is definitely preferred, but the word pronunciation is not unknown. It doesn't seem to be going away, so I would say it has established itself as a valid, though less common, variant.

Answer 3

As founder and editor of LEDs Magazine, I'd like to offer the following: the most common usage is to pronounce the letters L E D and to add a letter s for the plural, in the same way as one would write or pronounce TVs. Our publication would always write "an LED." However, it's also relatively common to pronounce "led" to rhyme with "dead." I believe the Dictionary extract quoted above is incorrect, since it should never be correct usage to write the letters in lower case. LED or L.E.D. only.

Answer 4

In speech, the context also determines how it is pronounced.

An /ˌel iː ˈdiː/ TV compared to an LCD TV;
but
/led/ lights compared to a neon lights.

LED (yourdictionary.com)
lead. ☆. noun. a semiconductor diode that emits light when voltage is applied: used in electric lighting, alphanumeric displays, as on digital watches, etc.

Answer 5

The Oxford English Dictionary has LED pronounced /ɛliːˈdiː/ ... Also the alternate spelling l.e.d. ... they list a third alternate spelling led with pronunciation /lɛd/ .

added for Tim

The OED does not try to tell us what is "correct usage" but only what they find actually used. Most of their examples are LED but they do have these as well:

1975 Hi-Fi Answers Feb. 78/2 The light pulses from the led are picked up by a photo-conductive cell and applied to the filter.

1976 Pract. Electronics Oct. 810 (caption) Block diagram of the system using two separate l.e.d. displays.

1982 What's New in Computing Nov. 19/2 The logger can be programmed to these levels, indicating on a led display which channel is giving a fault condition signal.