overread
adjEtymology From Middle English overreden, from Old English oferrǣdan (“to read over; read through; consider”), equivalent to over- + read.
1
Having read too much.
overread
verbUK /əʊvəˈɹiːd/ · past /əʊvəˈɹɛd/
Etymology From Middle English overreden, from Old English oferrǣdan (“to read over; read through; consider”), equivalent to over- + read.
1
Obsolete To read over, or peruse.
- Over the dore thus written she did spye, / Bee bold: she oft and oft it over-red, / Yet could not find what sence it figured […].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
2
Ambitransitive To interpret something to a greater degree, or in a more positive way, than appropriate; read in too much depth; overinterpret; overanalyze.
- To overread Plath's houses is to transform these biographical documents into spatial ones.2005, Hilde Heynen, Gulsum Baydar, Negotiating Domesticity:
- At the same time, we overread. That is, we find in narratives qualities, motives, moods, ideas, judgments, even events for which there is no direct evidence in the discourse.2008, H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative:
1 more example
- Did we just overread and overstate our place in the world?2009 January 20, Heather Timmons, Jeremy Kahn, “Past Graft Is Tainting New India”, in New York Times:
3
To read too much or excessively.
- Antonyms
- underread
- Derived terms
- overreader