Wakes

How to spell wakes

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wakes

What does wakes mean?

1. verbThird-person singular form of 'wake': stops sleeping or causes someone to stop sleeping.
2. nounTrails of disturbed water left behind by moving boats or ships.

Wakes in a sentence

• verb

  She wakes at six every weekday without an alarm.

• noun

  The passing ferries left foaming wakes across the harbour.

• verb

  The dog always wakes the whole house when the post arrives.

• noun

  Small craft rocked in the wakes of the larger vessels.

Where does wakes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word goes back to Old English, where two closely related verbs sat side by side: wacian, meaning 'to be or stay awake', and wæcnan, meaning 'to come awake' or 'to arise'. Both grew from a common Germanic root tied to the idea of watchfulness, the same root that gave us 'watch' and 'vigil'. Over the medieval period the senses blended into a single verb 'wake', covering both rousing from sleep and keeping watch. The watching sense produced the noun 'wake' for the night-long vigil held beside a body before burial, a custom that later widened into the gathering of mourners. The unrelated nautical sense, the track of disturbed water trailing a ship, came into English from Old Norse or Middle Low German vaki, meaning a hole or opening in ice; sailors borrowed it for the lane of open water a vessel leaves behind. The shared spelling is a coincidence of sound, but it explains why one short word carries such different meanings.

How the word is built

• wake (Old English wacian: to be awake, to watch)
• -s (third-person verb / plural noun ending)