读 dú = 讠 (yán, speech) + 卖 (mài, to show off / sell). The traditional form 讀 = 言 + 賣 with the same logic. Reference works classify it as an ideographic compound rather than a clean pictophonetic — the 卖 component carries a faint phonetic suggestion (in older readings of the right-hand element) but the modern simplified 卖 / mài does not match the modern reading dú at all. The Outlier reading takes the right-hand element more semantically: to put words 讠 on display 卖, i.e. to declaim, to show one's literacy in voice.

Whichever reconstruction one prefers, the everyday intuition is steady: the 讠 radical anchors 读 in the speech-family of characters (说 shuō, 话 huà, 语 yǔ, 词 cí, 诗 shī, 谁 shéi, 谢 xiè), and the core meaning is the voiced kind of reading. To 读 a book in classical and traditional Chinese culture was not silent perusal but recitation — chanting the text aloud, often by heart, until the rhythm of the prose was lodged in the body. This is why "to study" (in school) in modern Chinese is still 读书 — literally "to read-aloud books."

Three semantic lives fall out of this voiced core:

1. Reading as study. 读书 dúshū "to study" (and "to attend school"); 读小学 "to be in primary school"; 读者 dúzhě "reader" (of a publication).
2. Reading as voicing. 朗读 lǎngdú "to read aloud," 宣读 xuāndú "to read out (a statement)," 读音 dúyīn "the pronunciation" (literally "the read-sound").
3. Reading as interpretation. 解读 jiědú "to interpret" (a text, a signal, a result); the figurative move from voicing the marks on the page to construing what they mean.

Modern Chinese has expanded 读 along the same metaphorical line English uses: from reading marks on a page to construing meaning from any signal. The compound 解读 jiědú — 解 (to untie, to dissolve) + 读 — is the workhorse of this figurative range. One can 解读 a poem, a market signal, an opponent's facial expression, an electoral result, a piece of policy. The 解 marks the move from surface to underlying meaning; the 读 keeps the analogy to text-reading alive.

This is why 读 has quietly become one of the standard verbs in modern Chinese commentary: 解读时事 "interpreting current events," 读懂 dúdǒng "to read-and-understand" (a book, a person, a situation). 读懂一个人 "to truly understand a person" is one of the more common emotional metaphors in modern Chinese pop culture.

The same character has a second classical reading dòu, used in the term 句读 jùdòu — the art of correctly punctuating an unpunctuated classical text by identifying sentence ends (句 jù) and pauses (读 dòu). Pre-modern Chinese books were printed without punctuation; learning to 句读 a text was the foundational skill of classical literacy. To fail to 句读 a passage was to fail to understand it at all.

Modern students rarely encounter the dòu reading outside the term 句读 itself, but it is worth knowing: it explains why 读 is taught in school as having two pronunciations, and it preserves a fossil of the older idea that reading is fundamentally a matter of correctly carving a stream of characters into meaningful units in the voice.

Picture 读 as voiced literacy: the 讠 radical (speech) on the left, the rest of the character on the right standing for the thing put on display through the voice. To 读 is not to look at letters silently; it is to turn marks into sound, to make a text speak. The classical scholar memorising the Analects by chanting it morning after morning until the rhythm became second nature was the original 读书人 dúshūrén — the "person who reads books," a phrase that until quite recently meant simply a scholar.

The metaphor extends. To 读懂 a person is to voice them in your own head until you grasp what they are actually saying. To 解读 a signal is to read it the way a classical scholar reads an unpunctuated text — by carving the stream into the right meaningful units. The character keeps faith with its origin: every kind of reading, in Chinese, is a kind of speaking-back to what was written.