Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To rouse from sleep; awake: The noise wakened me.
- v. To rouse from a quiescent or inactive state; stir.
- v. To become awake; wake up: I plan to waken at six o'clock tomorrow. See Usage Note at wake1.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To wake; cease to sleep; be awakened: literally or figuratively.
- To keep awake; refrain from sleeping; watch.
- To excite or rouse from sleep; awaken.
- To excite to action or motion; rouse; stir up.
- To excite; produce; call forth.
- A wake; not sleeping.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To wake; to cease to sleep; to be awakened.
- v. To excite or rouse from sleep; to wake; to awake; to awaken.
- v. To excite; to rouse; to move to action; to awaken.
WordNet 3.0
- v. stop sleeping
- v. cause to become awake or conscious
Etymologies
- Old English wæcnan. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English wakenen, from Old English wæcnan; see weg- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead mans bone over the house, saying, with pungent sarcasm, As this bone may waken, so may these people waken; after that not a soul in the house can keep his or her eyes open.”
Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic. § 2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
“Some day I shall waken from a supposed hour's lingering here and find myself an old man with white hair and ragged coat, as in that fairy tale we read the other night.”
“Words have great benefit when they are used to shake and waken ourselves, but they can also lead us off track.”
“Because at night he could put them on deck and sleep without watching guard, so that if "savages" stole onto his decks at night, their shouts of pain when they stepped on the tacks would waken him.”
The Huffington Post: Maria Rodale: Book Review: Sailing Alone around the World
“She hopes to waken the black dragon and merge with it, like Momoka has merged with a dragon.”
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“Beau doesn't just waken her physical desires; he also awakens her desire to sing the blues.”
The Huffington Post: Michael Giltz: FringeFest NYC Finale - Fun "Pear" and Great "Mountain"
“So, the past nine years the war with Muslims has achieved nothing for the U.S., except for it has waken up the Muslims for Islam.”
The Huffington Post: Juan Williams Is Right: Political Correctness About Terrorists Must End!
“We must waken, Muske-Dukes admonishes, to our need to empathize, to overcome our great human tendency to forget, to distance, to protect ourselves from the conditions of others, to things happening elsewhere, something that is perhaps most dangerously possible in language.”
“Whenever she got stuck, she glanced up at the late show on the flat screen mounted to the wall and drummed the pen between upper and lower teeth, as if to waken her brain.”
“I would fall asleep in the act of carrying food to my mouth and waken in torment to find the act yet uncompleted.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘waken’.
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Olde Englisc
English words of Anglo-Saxon origin.
onslaught, slain, clove, clave, thrice, nincompoop, scorn, storm, scant, lurk, beneath, atop and 143 more...
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Anglo-Saxon
...or otherwise early Germanic.
storm, scorn, nincompoop, thrice, clave, clove, slain, onslaught, hew, breadth, hussy, pelt and 57 more...
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