Origins
The verb 'read' is so closely associated with the act of decoding written text that it may come as a surprise to learn that the word originally had nothing to do with writing at all. Old English 'rǣdan' primarily meant 'to advise,' 'to counsel,' 'to interpret,' and 'to guess.' Only secondarily did it acquire the meaning 'to make sense of written characters,' and this specialized sense gradually overtook all the others to become the word's dominant meaning in modern English.
The Old English form descends from Proto-Germanic *rēdaną, meaning 'to advise' or 'to counsel,' which in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁reh₁dʰ-, meaning 'to reason' or 'to count.' The cognates in other Germanic languages preserve the older semantic territory. German 'raten' means 'to advise' and 'to guess' — 'Rätsel' (riddle, puzzle) is its derivative, exactly paralleling English 'riddle' from Old English 'rǣdels.' Swedish 'råda' means 'to advise' or 'to rule.' Old Norse 'ráða' meant 'to advise, to rule, to interpret,' and appears on several runic inscriptions in the formula meaning 'to interpret these runes.'
The semantic bridge from 'counsel' to 'read' lies in the concept of interpretation. In early Germanic culture, runes were not merely letters but symbols imbued with meaning, mystery, and even magical power. The word 'rune' itself comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning 'secret' or 'mystery.' To 'rǣdan' a runic inscription was to interpret it, to puzzle out its meaning — an act that required wisdom and discernment, the same qualities needed to give good counsel. As literacy spread with Christianization and the adoption of the Latin alphabet, this sense of 'interpret written symbols' became increasingly dominant.
Old English Period
The older meaning of 'to advise' survived well into Middle English. Chaucer uses 'reden' in the sense of 'to counsel,' and the archaic form 'rede' (counsel, advice) persisted in literary and dialectal English into the nineteenth century, notably revived by Tolkien, who used it in 'The Lord of the Rings' to evoke the archaic flavor of his fictional languages. The word also survives in proper names: 'Æthelred' (meaning 'noble counsel') was a common Anglo-Saxon name — the famously ill-advised King Æthelred 'the Unready' bore a name meaning 'noble counsel,' and his nickname 'Unræd' (no-counsel, ill-advised) was a bitterly ironic pun.
The connection to 'riddle' is particularly illuminating. Old English 'rǣdels' (riddle) is formed from 'rǣdan' with a noun suffix — literally 'a thing to be interpreted.' The modern spelling 'riddle' reflects a consonant metathesis that occurred in Middle English. The deep kinship between reading and riddle-solving encoded in the language suggests that the Anglo-Saxons viewed all textual interpretation as a form of puzzle-solving, an active intellectual engagement rather than passive reception.
The phonological history of 'read' presents an interesting anomaly. The present tense is pronounced /riːd/ with a long vowel, while the past tense and past participle, spelled identically as 'read,' are pronounced /rɛd/ with a short vowel. This irregular pattern results from the Old English strong verb conjugation: the present stem had a long vowel (rǣdan, with ǣ representing a long vowel) while the past tense had a short one (rǣdde in the weak past tense that this verb adopted). The Great Vowel Shift raised the long /ɛː/ of the present tense to /iː/, while the short past tense vowel remained as /ɛ/.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
The PIE root *h₁reh₁dʰ- had a broader life outside Germanic as well. It may be related to Sanskrit 'rādhnóti' (to succeed, accomplish) and Old Irish 'ad-rīmi' (to count, reckon), though some of these connections are debated. The semantic field of 'reasoning, counting, reckoning' represented by the PIE root gave Germanic the meaning 'to counsel' (reasoning applied to human affairs) and eventually, through English, 'to read' (reasoning applied to written symbols).
Today, 'read' has extended metaphorically far beyond written text. We read facial expressions, read a room, read someone's mind, read the tea leaves, and read between the lines. A DJ reads the crowd; a poker player reads an opponent. In each case, the word preserves its deepest etymological meaning: not the mechanical decoding of symbols, but the interpretive act of discerning meaning from signs.