[Elements vary by font] Formerly, the right-center element was「copulation within orifice, with fleshpot goal of emissions」(四, 讀), but elements have been simplified to「intercourse, penis bound and copulating.」Some fonts use elements of「talk of penis jokes」that describe the sages getting together and discussing these glyphs by「flaunting」their own intelligence to first create each glyph, and then READING THE MIND of the creator, READING BETWEEN THE LINES so to speak and discern hidden meanings when the presentation took place in front of the other sages. INTERPRETING SIGNS AND SYMBOLS describes the process of figuring out what these glyphs mean by piecing together the elements comprising each glyph.
　「Speak to sell」meaning to SPEAK ALOUD, as would a carnival barker, about what one was selling drawn on a sandwich board or hand-carried sign, perhaps, as a merchant or the merchant's slave walked through streets or stood in front of a shop.
　Oldest meaning associated with the right element is「to show off, to flaunt」using elements of「netting penises with fleshpots for wealth」(pimping, no less). When coupled with「oral foreplay, intercourse」elements indicate「showing off and flaunting oral foreplay to net more penis and get money for flesh-peddling pimps.」Interested clients could then easily「read the signs」of what may have been occurring in those raised cages veiled by sheer curtains and backlight with red lights to silhouette a professional fellatrix doing her best as a precursor to written advertising of services, especially valuable in a day and an age when most everyone was illiterate anyway… almost no one could read. Note that individual elements displayed vary by font.
　Scholars have identified precursors of Chinese glyphs carved into bone and clay dating back about 8,000 years, but that evidence is not conclusive for stating that the writing of these glyphs began at that time. Clearly, the creation of glyphs would have had to begin much earlier for the glyphs to be in use in any manner. Dating from about 3,200 years ago, scholars have found「some 400,000 fragments with inscriptions in the Oracle Bone Script…. Several thousand bones and plastrons have been reconstructed and many thousands of texts have been studied. The texts contain over 30,000 distinct characters, which are thought to be variant forms of around 4,000 individual characters, and scholars believe that they can understand between 1,500 and 2,000 of these characters. There may be 5,000 or so individual characters used on the Oracle Bones, not including variant forms, and possibly twice as many were used in everyday life.」And yet, evidence exists that intelligent hominids inhabited China as long as 115,000 years ago by the discovery of sophisticated bone tools 　[　https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319220955.htm 2018-03-21　]　 arguably, humans began developing these glyphs over a period of tens of thousand of years in order to enable their use in writing 3,200 years ago. Similarly, the social practices of foot-dis-integrating, shaman religion and pimping, sexually transmitted diseases, harem-building by overlords, selling one's daughters as slaves and all other concepts depicted by the glyphs would also logically have been extant at the times the various glyphs were created for these concepts to be included in the meanings…for example, citing the oldest-known writing that mentions foot-dis-integrating does not indicate that foot-dis-integrating began at the time of the writing: it merely indicates that the practice was already in use, developed, and socially accepted by the time of that writing.

Modern definitions (that generally disregard history) …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may list only pigeonholed definitions, euphemisms, or meaningless mnemonics)
Chinese: Japanese variant of 讀|读
Japanese: reading, to read, to count, huge amount of material, richness of content, to read mind, to read between the lines
Unihan extended: read, study; pronounce
EDRDG: read

Used within names (nanori)
よみ