Email, documents, filing

Halfway down the list sits o espaçamento entre linhas, and the ordinary English word for it is not a description at all but the name of a metal. In a printing house type was set line by line in lead, and to open a page up the compositor slid thin strips of lead between the lines. The strips were the « leads », the practice was « leading », and the word outlived the workshop, so that a designer still asks for more « leading » on a page no press ever touched. Two things make it a trap for a reader coming from Portuguese. It rhymes with « heading » and not with « reading », which makes it one of the rare places where English spelling hides two unrelated words behind one shape. And the software says something else: a menu offers « line spacing », a stylesheet says « line height », and neither of them remembers the lead. Portuguese keeps the plain description, the space between the lines, and has one word beside it, a entrelinha — which is where the two languages meet again, because reading nas entrelinhas is reading between the lines.