Read

How to spell read

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce read

What does read mean?

1. verbTo look at written or printed words and understand their meaning.
2. verbThe past tense of the verb to read, pronounced like the colour but spelled the same as the present tense.

Read in a sentence

• I like to read the news before work each morning.

• She read the entire report last night before the meeting.

• Please read the contract carefully before you sign it.

• He read three novels during the holiday.

Where does read come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb rǣdan, which carried a much broader meaning than it does today: to advise, to counsel, to interpret, and to guess at something hidden. That sense survives in the old phrase 'to read a riddle', meaning to puzzle it out, and in the related noun that gave us 'rede' (counsel). The Germanic relatives, such as German raten 'to advise' and 'Rätsel' (a riddle), show that the act of decoding text was first thought of as interpreting or divining its meaning. As literacy spread, the narrower sense of looking at written letters and understanding them took over. A notable quirk is that the spelling stayed fixed while the pronunciation split: the present tense rhymes with 'seed', yet the past tense rhymes with 'red', which is exactly why writers sometimes hesitate over this small but irregular word.

How the word is built

• read (from Old English rǣdan: to advise, interpret, read); a single unanalysable root, no affixes

Words that sound like read

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• reed: A tall slender grass that grows in or near shallow water.