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The Collaborative International Dictionary
To read between the lines

Read \Read\, v. i.

  1. To give advice or counsel. [Obs.]

  2. To tell; to declare. [Obs.]
    --Spenser.

  3. To perform the act of reading; to peruse, or to go over and utter aloud, the words of a book or other like document.

    So they read in the book of the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense.
    --Neh. viii. 8.

  4. To study by reading; as, he read for the bar.

  5. To learn by reading.

    I have read of an Eastern king who put a judge to death for an iniquitous sentence.
    --Swift.

  6. To appear in writing or print; to be expressed by, or consist of, certain words or characters; as, the passage reads thus in the early manuscripts.

  7. To produce a certain effect when read; as, that sentence reads queerly.

    To read between the lines, to infer something different from what is plainly indicated; to detect the real meaning as distinguished from the apparent meaning.

Wikipedia
To read between the lines

The popular phrase "to read between the lines" may have originated from messages actually hidden in disappearing ink or otherwise concealed between obvious lines of text. Its use has broadened over time, and has come to be associated with finding meaning in a text that is not obvious on a cursory examination.

Usage examples of "to read between the lines".

Carialle found the technology was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins compared to her state-of-the-art equipment, but she was able to read between the lines of scan.

Every sensory input can be edited, given time : propaganda can be pushed directly into the mind with no chance to read between the lines, to see the bigger picture, or analyse rationally.

Sometimes, you almost have to read between the lines to figure out what's important.

That night, in a waystation with a door, I went through more of The Basis of Order, trying to read between the lines, under the lines, find hidden meanings in the words.

I stood in the corridor, trying to read between the lines of what I'd heard.

Mostly the story was confined to the financial pages so that much of it was written in terms that were difficult to follow, but I understood enough of it to read between the lines and realise what my father must have gone through.

But the strangers failed to read between the lines, dismissing him too hastily as merely crazed.

It was Gedeon Sekforde who encouraged Tate to read between the lines of the Measure when his elder son would question the accuracy of the younger7 s interpretations.

I knew him well enough by now to read between the lines, but I couldn't believe what I was thinking.

He never knew how to read between the lines, or appreciate quality.

For those who know how to read between the lines, this is sufficient to prove Newton had the calculus—.

When she was researching the war at Father Dragon's urging, Alara herself had been forced to read between the lines to discover how much damage had actually been done, by finding the rolls of the dead, and the account of destruction of property as noted in the surveys at the end of the war.

She had searched in many chronicles, had learned to read between the lines and in the marginalia so that she wouldn't discover too late things that she ought to have known, that needed to be woven into the story so that her history of the Wendish people would be complete.

Bradshaw hadn't told him in so many words that she had tried to smother the child, but he had been in the job long enough to pick up the nuances, to read between the lines, to recognise and evaluate anxiety.