Awhile means for a short time. Stay awhile, wait awhile, rest awhile.
It is an adverb and is slightly literary — in ordinary speech people say for a while. The spelling matters: awhile as one word already contains for, so for awhile is a doubling and is usually marked wrong; a while as two words is a noun phrase and is correct after a preposition — for a while, after a while, in a while. If you can replace it with for a short time, one word is right.
awhile is a short duration.
Also accepted in games: briefly
Old English ane hwile meant one while, and the two words fused. The same fusion produced ago, away and asleep, all of which began as separate words and stopped being felt as such.
Old English
āne — (for) a
English, today
awhile
Built from
From Old English āne (“(for) a”) hwil (“while”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA