Waking

How to spell waking

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce waking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does waking mean?

1. verbEmerging from sleep, or the act of doing so.
2. adjectiveRelating to the time when a person is awake rather than asleep.

Waking in a sentence

• verb

  Waking before dawn left her groggy for the rest of the morning.

• adjective

  She spends most of her waking hours at the office.

• verb

  The baby kept waking every two hours through the night.

• adjective

  The toddler's waking moments were filled with constant questions.

Where does waking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb wacian, meaning 'to be or remain awake', and the closely related wæcnan, 'to wake up', both rooted in a Germanic family that also gave us 'watch' and 'awake'. The original sense was about staying alert or keeping watch, which is why an all-night vigil over a body before burial came to be called a 'wake'. The present participle 'waking' settled into its modern shape as the base verb 'wake' lost its final pronounced vowel and then dropped the silent 'e' before the -ing ending, a regular English spelling rule. That dropped 'e' is the only real trap here: the word is 'waking', never 'wakeing'. By extension the form also works as an adjective, as in 'waking hours', describing the stretch of time a person spends conscious rather than asleep.

How the word is built

• wak- (from Old English wacian, to be awake)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix; the silent 'e' of 'wake' is dropped before -ing)