leer

Forms

leer (first-person singular present leo, first-person singular preterite leí, past participle leído)^[1] The Razón de amor (first half of the 13th century) writes leyer;^[2][3][4] leyer is also the modern Aragonese form, and Asturian has lleer, llier or ller.^[2][3][4] Autoridades notes the y between the two e's in forms such as leyera, leyesse.^[5]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish leer, inherited from Latin legō (“to gather, collect; to choose; to read”).^[6][7][8][1] Intervocalic /ɡ/ before /e/ was lost in Castilian, leaving the two vowels side by side.^[3]

The verb is common to all the Romance languages except Romanian: Portuguese ler, Galician ler, Asturian lleer, Aragonese leyer, Catalan llegir, French lire and Italian leggere.^[6][3][1] García de Diego rejects Meyer-Lübke's view that the Catalan form, with its ⟨g⟩, is a learned form.^[3]

The Latin verb goes back to Proto-Italic *legō and Proto-Indo-European *leǵ- (“to gather, collect”); its closest cognate is Ancient Greek λέγω (légō, “to speak, choose”).^[9][1] How “gather” became “read” is not clear: Bénaben and the DHLF suggest Latin phrases meaning “to gather the letters with the eyes” or “to call the roll of the senators”.^[10][11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas places the first record in the earliest texts, the Cantar de mio Cid among them.^[6][7] The CDH's earliest hit is the Fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy): trobaron un libro en el tiemplo e leyeronle delant el pueblo “they found a book in the temple and read it before the people”.^[2] The first hit without a later copy is in the acts of the Cortes of León of 1208.^[2]

Semantic evolution

Old Spanish already used the verb for a teacher who explains a text to his students, a sense of Medieval Latin legere “to teach, lecture”.^[12][13] Covarrubias in 1611 defines it as pronouncing aloud what is written and as teaching a subject in public, and the phrase leer a uno la cartilla meant “to tell someone plainly what he must know”.^[14] In the universities leer de extraordinario was the lecturing of a bachelor appointed by the faculty; the sense “to recite the lecture of an examination for a post” lasted into the 20th-century dictionaries.^[15][8]

The figurative sense “to read someone's mind or feelings” is in the dictionaries from 1843, and reading music from Alemany (1917).^[16][17] The present dictionary adds reading the hour, a map or the cards, and Moliner the reading of data from a disc or by a computer.^[8][18] The derivative leyenda meant “a text, what is read” in Berceo and took its modern sense “legend” only in the 19th century.^[6][7] Quechua borrowed the verb as liyiy.^[1]

Timeline

• c. 1140 – first record, in the Cantar de mio Cid.^[6][7]
• c. 1200 – the Fazienda de Ultra Mar: leyeronle delant el pueblo.^[2]
• 1220–1250 – first record of leyenda and lección.^[7]
• 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's prose uses it for reading and for teaching from a text.^[12]
• 1438 – first records of lector and lectura.^[7]
• 1495 – leído “well-read” and legible first recorded, in Nebrija.^[7][6]
• 1529 – first record from the Americas, in Nicaragua.^[19]
• 1611 – Covarrubias derives it from Latin lego.^[14]
• 1843 – the Academy's dictionary records the figurative sense “to see into someone's mind”.^[16]
• 1884 – leyenda is first defined as a traditional tale.^[6]

Meanings

Verb

1. To read: to run the eyes over writing or print and understand it: Leía el periódico en el tren.^[8][1]
2. To understand any kind of graphic representation: leer un gráfico, leer las notas.^[8][18]
3. To interpret a text in a certain way.^[8]
4. In public examinations for a post, to deliver the discourse called lección.^[8]
5. To make out someone's thoughts or feelings from signs: Le leí el miedo en la cara.^[8]
6. To divine something hidden by esoteric practices: leer las cartas, leer la mano.^[8]
7. (computing) Of a device, to retrieve the information stored on a disc or other medium.^[18][1]
8. (rare) Of a teacher, to lecture on a subject from a text.^[8]

Word family

• leído
• leyenda
• legendario
• leíble
• releer

Related words

• lección
• lector
• lectura
• legible
• legión
• elegir
• Latin legō

Usage notes

The phrase leer entre líneas means “to read between the lines”.^[18]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. leer
3. ^ a b c d e García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 3822
4. ^ a b Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (2000), Diccionariu de la Llingua Asturiana, Uviéu: ALLA; online at https://mas.academiadelallingua.com/diccionariu, p. s.v. lleer
5. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 4
6. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 3, 619
7. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. leer
8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. leer
9. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. leer
11. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert, p. s.v. lire
12. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. leer
13. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill, p. s.v. legere
14. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1073
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1869), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 11th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de Don Manuel Rivadeneyra, p. 460
16. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1843), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 9th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Francisco María Fernández, p. 433
17. ^ Alemany y Bolufer, José (1917), Diccionario de la lengua española, Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, p. 1017
18. ^ a b c d Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. leer
19. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. leer