Other forms: wakes, woke, woken, waking
To wake is to stop sleeping: eyes open, and there is the ceiling. You wake at six without the alarm, you wake to rain hitting the window, you wake the children by pulling the curtains back and saying nothing.
It usually travels with up — wake up, wake me up at seven — and the past is woke and woken, never waked. Two other words share the spelling and neither has anything to do with sleep. The wake of a boat is the churned trail of water behind it, which is where in the wake of comes from: after something, and usually after something bad. And a wake is the gathering held after a funeral, where people eat, drink and tell stories about the person who has gone.
1verbwakeTo stop sleeping, or to make somebody else stop sleeping. Usually wake up.~33%
“I wake at six every morning, whether I want to or not.”
2nountrailThe trail of disturbed water a boat leaves behind it.~53%
“Gulls followed the wake of the ferry all the way out.”
3noungatheringThe gathering held after a funeral.~14%
“Half the village came to the wake and stayed until midnight.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 42 of them on a sense (98 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: wake up
Three words hide in these four letters and only two of them are related. Waking up and the wake held after a funeral are the same word — Old English wacu, a noun sitting beside the verb. The wake behind a boat is a stranger to both: Middle Dutch and Old Norse vǫk, a hole in the ice, from a root meaning moist, wet. A ship's wake is the hole it leaves in the water.
Proto-Indo-European
*weǵ-
English, today
wake
A merger of two verbs of related/similar form and meaning:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA