Wake

How to spell wake

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wake

What does wake mean?

1. verbTo stop sleeping, or to rouse someone else from sleep.
2. nounThe track of disturbed water left behind a moving boat or ship.

Wake in a sentence

• verb

  The alarm will wake me at six tomorrow.

• noun

  The small dinghy bobbed in the ferry's wake.

• verb

  Try not to wake the baby when you come in.

• noun

  Ducks scattered across the wake left by the passing barge.

Where does wake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wake traces back to two closely related Old English verbs, wacian, meaning 'to be awake or to remain watchful', and wæcnan, meaning 'to come to life or to arise', both descended from the Germanic root that also gave us 'watch' and 'awake'. The original idea was less about ending sleep and more about keeping a vigilant guard through the night, which is why an all-night watch beside a body before burial came to be called a wake. The nautical sense, the visible track of disturbed water left behind a moving ship, arrived later and probably came from Old Norse vök, meaning 'a hole or opening in ice', borrowed by sailors and reshaped to describe the smooth lane a vessel cuts through the sea. Over time the two threads blended in spelling under one short, deceptively simple word. Because the vowel sound is spelled with a silent final 'e' rather than the 'a' plus 'i' some writers expect, 'wake' is far easier to spell than its history is to untangle.

How the word is built

• wake (from Old English wacian/wæcnan: to be or become awake)