to read her lips
1
6.7
- phrasal verb
:
leer los labios
- He can only read her lips: "Honey, what's wrong?"
Examples
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During the movie, I had to read her lips since the sound was muted.
-
I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I could read her lips to understand her message.
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I can almost read her lips.
-
You could read her lips.
-
I could read her lips exactly.
Fiction book (1997) -
I couldn't hear them, but every once in a while I caught a word by reading her lips.
Fiction book (1997) -
Sometimes I realized I wasn't hearing her voice as much as reading her lips.
Fiction book (1996) -
When the music was too loud, he had to read her lips to follow the conversation.
Synonyms
109
4.6
To see, hear, or understand something when it is hard
11
5.7
To understand what someone says by watching their lips
4
7.2
Understand what someone says by looking at their mouth
To understand what someone says by watching their lips
To use technology to identify the words a person says from their lip and face movements
How Accurate
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to interpret what a woman is saying by observing her lip movements' is directly and literally derivable from 'read' (make sense of signs) + 'her' (possessive) + 'lips' (mouth edges). This compositional, visually-based metaphor is cross-linguistically common (e.g., 'read lips') and follows straightforward English composition, so a B1 learner who knows the words would ordinarily understand it.
Etymology
Read her lips comes from the literal act of trying to read a person's lips—you watch the movement of her mouth and guess the words when you cannot hear them. So, it now means 'to understand what a woman is saying by watching her mouth'.