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reader

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɹiː.də//
  • United States//ˈɹi.dɚ//
  • //ˈɹiː.dɐ//

A person who reads.

noun

  1. 1

    A person who reads.

    an early reader, a talented reader

  2. 2

    A person who reads a publication.

    10,000 weekly readers

    In its May 1965 issue, Life magazine condemned skateboards as a “menace to limb and even to life,” and cautioned readers about riders who “take over the paths made for peaceful strollers.”

  3. 3

    A person who recites literary works, usually to an audience.

  4. 4

    A proofreader.

  5. 5

    A person employed by a publisher to read works submitted for publication and determine their merits.

    They were dog-eared by the hands of many a publisher's-reader and postman.

  6. 6

    A position attached to aristocracy, or to the wealthy, with the task of reading aloud, often in a foreign language.

    "I am commissioned by the Queen to offer you the place of Italian reader; and I assure you the offer was made with many kind expressions of interest. You will enter upon the duties, which are almost nominal, immediately."

  7. 7

    A university lecturer ranking below a professor.

  8. 8

    Any device that reads something.

    a card reader, a microfilm reader

    The reMarkable PDF reader is really targeted at the digital writing market, rather than the digital reading market, though most serious e-readers support pens for annotations and signatures.

    A quick search on Kaiser's website, there was nothing that talked about plate readers or a usage policy.

  9. 9

    A book of exercises to accompany a textbook.

  10. 10

    An elementary textbook for those learning to read, in a native language or a foreign language.

    Appletons’ School Readers

  11. 11

    A literary anthology.

    A good bedtime reader should entertain and delight, and that's what I find in Girard Kent's The Boy Harleqin ^([sic]) and Other Stories.

  12. 12

    A lay or minor cleric who reads lessons in a church service.

  13. 13

    A newspaper advertisement designed to look like a news article rather than a commercial solicitation.

  14. 14

    Reading glasses.

  15. 15

    slangMarked playing cards used by cheaters.

    LUMINOUS READERS—Marked cards that can be read only through tinted glasses.

    Of the 150,000,000 decks of cards sold each year in America, Scarne estimates that 1 percent get marked at some point. Yet, as he discovered in his 1972 gambling survey, only 2 percent of average players have any idea of how to detect these "readers."

  16. 16

    obsoleteA wallet or pocketbook.

    […] Q was a Queer-screen, that served as a blind; / R was a Reader, with flimsies well lined; […]

  17. 17

    At Eton College, a lesson for which pupils are sent back to their separate school houses.

Etymology

From Middle English reder, redar, redere, redare, from Old English rēdere, rǣdere (“a reader; scholar; diviner”), from Proto-West Germanic *rādāri, equivalent to read + -er. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Räider (“advisor”), Dutch rader (“advisor”), German Rater (“advisor”).

Forms

plural
readers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).