means To look at written or printed symbols and understand the meaning they carry, or to interpret signs, situations, or people in a similar way.

from From Old English 'rædan,' which meant to advise, counsel, guess, or interpret — not specifically to read text at all. The same root gives us the German 'raten' (to advise or guess) and survives in the old name Ethelred 'the Unready,' which really meant 'the ill-advised.' The leap to 'reading a book' came because making sense of mysterious marks on a page felt like solving a riddle or taking counsel from them — so the word for figuring things out quietly slid over to the act of decoding written words.