lect

The root lect comes from Latin legere, whose past participle was lectum. Before it meant anything to do with books, legere was a farmer's and forager's word: to pick up, gather, collect. You legere olives off a tree, firewood off the ground, soldiers into an army.

That literal act of picking branched in two directions that look very different today but share one gesture — the hand reaching out to take this and leave that.

1. Picking up = gathering. Add a prefix of direction and you get the most concrete family:
- col- (together) + legere → collect: pick things up together into one pile. Hence collection, collective.
- re- + col- + legere → recollect / recollection: gather your memories back together.
- A college (Latin collegium) was originally a body of colleagues — people 'chosen together' into one group.

2. Picking = choosing. When you pick olives you are also selecting the good ones. So the same root means choose:
- se- (apart, aside) + legere → select: pick out and aside, set the good ones apart.
- e- (out) + legere → elect: pick someone out of the crowd — by vote.
- neg- (not) + legere → neglect: not to pick up — to leave a thing lying, to fail to attend to it. (So negligence is the failure to bother picking something up.)
- The lig/leg spellings carry the same 'choose' sense: eligible = able to be picked out; diligent = one who picks carefully and repeatedly (di- intensive), hence painstaking and hard-working; elegant = carefully picked out, refined in taste.

3. The great leap: picking up letters = reading. Here is the jump that surprises learners. The Romans imagined reading as the eye picking up letters one after another along a line. So legere also came to mean read:
- lecture — originally just a reading; a monk read aloud to the others.
- legible — able to be picked up by the eye, readable.
- legend — Latin legenda, 'things that must be read' (the saints' lives read on feast days), later softening into 'a famous old story.'
- dialect — Greek dialektos, 'a way of speaking/choosing words' (here Greek legein 'to speak,' a cousin of Latin legere).

One consistent thread runs through all three: the hand or eye reaching out to take one thing at a time. Gather them → collect. Take the best → select. Take letters in a row → read.

A boundary worth knowing. Many leg- words you may expect here — legal, legislate, legitimate, privilege, legacy, delegate — do not come from legere 'read/choose.' They come from a separate Latin word, lēx / lēgis ('law'), and its verb lēgāre ('to depute, bequeath'). The two are very ancient cousins (a 'law' may originally have been 'what is gathered/laid down'), but in usage they form their own family about law and authority. Don't force them through the 'reading' story.