Woken

How to spell woken

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce woken

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does woken mean?

1. verbPast participle of 'wake': roused or having come out of sleep.

Woken in a sentence

• The baby had woken twice before midnight.

• She was woken by the sound of rain on the window.

Where does woken come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'wake', which traces back to the Old English wacan, meaning 'to become awake' or 'to arise', and the closely related wacian, 'to be awake' or 'to watch'. These come from a Germanic root that also gave English 'watch' and 'wake' in the sense of a vigil held over the dead, since to keep watch is literally to stay awake. The strong-verb pattern, with its vowel shift from 'wake' to 'woke' to 'woken', is an inheritance from the old Germanic conjugation system, the same pattern that gives 'speak, spoke, spoken' and 'break, broke, broken'. The '-en' ending on the participle is itself an ancient Germanic past-participle marker, so the spelling preserves a grammatical fossil thousands of years old. Because the modern spelling follows that regular 'spoke/spoken, broke/broken' template so neatly, the trap for writers is mostly choosing 'woken' over the colloquial but nonstandard 'woke' as a participle.

How the word is built

• wak- (root from Old English wacan: to become awake)
• -en (past participle suffix)