Readable means easy or enjoyable to read. A highly readable account, barely readable, readable and clear.
It has two senses that pull apart, since one is about the writing and the other about whether the marks can be made out at all. Readability scores measure sentence length and word length, which is a crude proxy for the first sense.
1adjectivereadableEasy or enjoyable to read.
“It's a serious history book, but it's surprisingly readable.”
readable is a quality.
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
read
English, today
readable
From read + -able. read comes 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