means The act of looking at written or printed words and understanding what they mean.

from From Old English 'rǣdan,' a remarkably busy verb that meant to advise, to interpret, to guess at, and to make sense of something puzzling — note that decoding marks on a page once felt like solving a riddle. It's a cousin of German 'raten' (to advise or guess) and survives in 'rede' (counsel) and the place-name Reading. The bookish sense — actually parsing text — is the meaning that quietly won out, but the older flavor lingers whenever we 'read' a situation, a face, or the room.