overread

present singular third person overreads · participle present overreading

1. obsoleteTo read over, or peruse.First known use 10th–19th c.

   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. ambitransitiveTo interpret something to a greater degree, or in a more positive way, than appropriate; read in too much depth; overinterpret; overanalyze.

   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

   2 more examples

   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

3. To read too much or excessively.

comparative more overread · superlative most overread

1. Having read too much.