Word.ws English Dictionary

close reading

close reading noun: the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text.

Noun

close reading (countable and uncountable, plural close readings)

  1. The careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text.
    • Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up (Ah yes—the tree mentioned once on page 89 and...2010 July 1, Heather Horn, “Stop Close Reading”, in The Atlantic

Forms of close reading

pluralclose readings

Questions about close reading

What does close reading mean?
Close reading means the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text.
What part of speech is close reading?
Close reading is a noun.
What is the plural of close reading?
The plural of close reading is close readings.

Words near close reading in the dictionary

  1. close ranks
  2. close reach
  3. close reached
  4. close reaches
  5. close reaching
  6. close reading
  7. close round
  8. close season
  9. close seasons
  10. close shave
  11. close shaves

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: close reading (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “close reading.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/close_reading. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.