Other forms: reading, reads
To read is to look at written words and take in what they say. A menu, a road sign, a message on your phone while the kettle boils.
The trap is the past tense: read is spelled the same and said like red — I read it yesterday. You can read to yourself or read aloud, read a child a story, or read a book from cover to cover. It stretches well past print: a meter reads 47, a sign reads NO ENTRY, and to read a person is to work out what is going on behind the face. British students read a subject at university, and a well-read person is one who has read widely. As a noun it is friendly and casual: that book is a good read.
1verbreadTo look at written words and understand them.~49%
“He reads two newspapers before breakfast.”
2verbaloudTo say written words aloud.~31%
“She read the letter out to everyone at the table.”
3verbshowTo show words or a measurement.~12%
“The sign reads CLOSED ON MONDAYS.”
4verbworkTo work out what someone is thinking or feeling.~2%
“I could not read his expression at all.”
5verbstudyTo study a subject at university, in British English.~6%
“She read history at Leeds.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Reading used to mean advising. Old English rǣdan meant to counsel, advise and consult, and also to interpret, from Proto-Germanic *rēdaną, advise or counsel, and a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to arrange. German raten and Dutch raden still mean advise or guess; only English narrowed interpreting down to interpreting letters on a page.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hreh₁dʰ- — to arrange
Proto-Germanic
*rēdaną — advise, counsel
Proto-West Germanic
*rādan
Old English
rǣdan — to counsel, advise, consult; interpret, read
Middle English
reden
English, today
read
From Middle English reden, from Old English rǣdan (“to counsel, advise, consult; interpret, read”), from Proto-West Germanic rādan, from Proto-Germanic rēdaną (“advise, counsel”), from Proto-Indo-European Hreh₁dʰ- (“to arrange”). Cognate with Scots rede, red (“to advise, counsel, decipher, read”), stq räide (“to advise, counsel”), West Frisian riede (“to advise, counsel”), Dutch raden (“to advise; guess”), German raten (“to advise; guess”), Danish råde (“to advise”), Swedish råda (“to advise, counsel”), Persian رده (“to order, to arrange, class”). In West Germanic the verb had a sense “interpret”, which developed further into “interpret letters” in English and “interpret by intuition, guess” on the continent. Compare rede.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA