Other forms: awoke, awoken
Awake means not sleeping — eyes open, mind working. Wide awake, still awake, lie awake.
It is one of a small set of adjectives that cannot go before a noun: you can be awake, but an awake child is wrong — say a child who is awake. Alive, alone, afraid and asleep behave the same way. Awake is also a verb, awake, awoke, awoken, but it is literary; wake up is what people say. Note awaken, which is even more literary, and wide awake, which is the standard intensifier.
1adjectiveawakeNot sleeping.
“She was still awake at two in the morning.”
2adjectiveawareAware of something, in figurative use.
“The board is finally awake to the risk.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
awake is a state of not sleeping.
The a- at the front of awake, asleep, alive and afire is a worn-down Old English preposition meaning on or in. To be awake is to be in waking, and that little a- is the fossil of a whole grammatical construction.
Proto-Indo-European
*weǵ-
Old English
āwacan
Middle English
awake
English, today
awake
Built from
From Middle English awake, from awaken, from Old English āwacan. From Middle English awake, a shortened form of awaken (“awakened, awake”), past participle of Middle English awaken (“to awaken”). See verb below. Compare stq woak (“awake”), German Low German waak (“awake”), German wach (“awake”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA