1083. Is it "woke," "woken," or "waked"? We break down why the verb "wake" is one of the trickiest in English, with four competing forms and centuries of change. Then, we lighten things up with a look at vacation vocabulary—from "staycation" to "glamping."
1083. Is it "woke," "woken," or "waked"? We break down why the verb "wake" is one of the trickiest in English, with four competing forms and centuries of change. Then, we lighten things up with a look at vacation vocabulary—from "staycation" to "glamping."
The "wake" segment was written by Natalie Schilling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and who runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm. You can find her on LinkedIn.
The "vacation" segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
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by Natalie Schilling
What’s the first thing you did this morning? Unless you worked an overnight shift, chances are you woke up. Or you awakened. Or awoke. Which is it? And why is it so hard to tell?
Well, linguists have a saying: Every word has its own history. And that history can affect current word meanings, pronunciations, and usages – and sometimes lead to confusion. The big problem with "wake" is that it’s not just one verb but four – "wake," "waken," "awake," and "awaken" – each of which has intersected with the other three during the course of their history. And they've had a lot of time because they all go back to Old English.
"Wake" and “waken” originally came from two different verbs, “wacan,” which meant “to come into being” or “to become awake,” and “wacian,” which meant “to be awake.”
But although their meanings were similar, the way we handled them wasn't: “wake” is an irregular verb with original past and participle forms "woke" and "has waken," while “waken” is regular and forms its past and participle in the usual way: by adding "-ed." That’s already confusing enough, since the present-tense regular form of one is the participle of the other, but alongside these forms people also started putting an "a" at the beginning – saying "to awake" and "to awaken." It's the same little a-prefix we see on historical and regional forms like “He was a-huntin’ and a-fishin’.”
Irregular verbs like "wake/woke" are trickier than regular verbs like "wake/waked," since we have to memorize all the different forms. That’s why there’s a tendency to turn irregular verbs into regular verbs, although sometimes the older irregular forms stick around as well. And that's what happened in Middle English – during Chaucer’s day – people added a regular past tense form to “wake,” but they still kept “woke,” so that now you could say either “He woke at dawn” or “He waked at dawn.”
But then later, in Elizabethan times, people did something that happens less often: they switched again and gave "wake" an alternative IRregular PARTICIPLE, "woken," maybe because they were tempted to match the verb "break/broke/broken." Nobody knows why, but Shakespeare’s contemporaries began saying things like “She has woken,” while still also saying “She has waken.” At the same time, confusingly enough, they were still using the entirely separate verb “waken,” as in “She has wakened.” It was a mess!
And just in case anyone in 1500s England was still feeling confident in their ability to keep all these different forms straight, someone had the bright idea to add "up" – so now we could have "I woke," "I woke up," "I waked," "I waked up," and "I have waken/woken/waked," with or without the “up.” And don’t forget the "a-" forms were still kicking around, too, so we also need to factor in “awoke,” “awaked,” “awakened,” and all its cousins.
I’m sure there’s an equation we could use to calculate all the various possibilities here, but who among us would be able to do the math when we’re in the middle of talking about our early mornings – especially before we’ve had our coffee?
So what CAN we do to decide what verb and what past and participle forms to use? Some grammarians have suggested that we use "waken" for the transitive, meaning when the verb has an object, as in "He wakened the baby," and use "awaken" in intransitive cases where the verb acts alone, as in "He awakened at dawn." This rule would be all well and good if it reflected actual usage, but it doesn't. And if it gave us some clue as to when to use the two main verbs — "wake" versus "waken" — and not just when to add an “a” to the beginning of the word and when not to. But again, it doesn't.
Sources also vary on when to use "up" – it seems to go better with "wake" than "waken," but not so well with either “awake” or “awaken.” To my ear at least, "I need to wake up" sounds fine, but "I need to waken up" and “We awoke up” sound weird.
Other people have suggested making a distinction between figurative and literal uses, but again, there’s disagreement over whether the division is between "wake" and "waken," the irregular and regular forms, or between the a-prefixed or un-prefixed forms. So good luck deciding how to phrase a figurative usage like “My senses were woken by the inspirational poem.” Maybe they were actually awoken, waked, wakened, awakened – or woken up – and maybe you’d be better off just changing your sentence to something like “My senses were heightened.” Not exactly the same meaning, but a lot safer, grammatically speaking.
And dictionaries aren’t much help either. Depending on which one you consult, you’ll see the predominant past tense of "wake" listed as either "woke" or "waked" and the participle as "has waked," "has woken" "has woked," and/or "has woke."
It's also possible that there are differences in different countries. Garner’s Modern English Usage says Americans prefer the participle “waked,” while Brits opt for “woken.” But that’s not the whole story either. At least one source, the Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, indicates that while “He waked at dawn” and “He has waked” were indeed once widespread in the U.S., “He woke” and “has woken” are now taking over, based on usage data across different generations. We can still find pockets of speakers in the U.S. who use “waked,” for example, in the South, where people tend to choose regular “-ed” past tense forms over irregulars when there’s a choice – for example, with “dived” versus “dove.” But it looks like, in general, irregular “woke” and “has woken” are winning out in the U.S., at least for now.
As for the historically regular verb "waken," as in “He wakened the baby” or “She has wakened early,” DARE lists it as “somewhat old-fashioned.” So maybe these forms will fade away one day, and we’ll be left with only "wake," "woke," and "woken" – a relatively regular irregular verb at long last. At this point, I'm hoping so!
Incidentally, this dictionary is also a great source on where particular words are used – think “sub” versus “hoagie” or “pop” versus “soda” versus “Coke.” I don’t know about you, but these words are awakening up my taste buds – or wait: Is that supposed to be wakening? Waking up? Oh, never mind! Garner’s usage guide is right when it notes that all these questions about "wake" and its related forms are "perhaps the most vexing in the language." In-deed!
Listeners have asked about all these verbs over the years, but ultimately, about the only advice we can give is that things are variable, and they still seem to be in flux even after all these centuries of change.
The long, tangled history of "wake" and "waken" may not tell us when to use which form, but it teaches us a couple of important lessons anyway. First, although we may want to appeal to history to tell us how to use words "correctly," this doesn’t always work, as forms fall in and out of favor, and today’s most "proper"-sounding forms — "She woke up," "She dove into the pool," — would likely have sounded odd or even "wrong" to Americans in the 1800s.
And secondly, as much as we might want one single proper, standard way of phrasing everything, we’ll never have complete certainty. Language is constantly changing, language standards change, and most changes leave remnants of earlier forms, contributing to today’s richly varied linguistic landscape.
That segment was written by Natalie Schilling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and who runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm. You can find her on LinkedIn.
by Samantha Enslen
We're heading into vacation season in the United States. Highways are starting to be jammed, pools will soon be packed, and campgrounds at capacity. With that in mind, let’s talk about the word “vacation” and other ways to talk about taking time off.
The word “vacation” comes from the Latin word “vacāt,” which is the participial stem of the verb “vacāre,” meaning to be empty or free. Other words that come from the same root are “vacant” and “vacancy,” as well as the obsolete words “vacantry,” meaning idleness, and “vacatur,” meaning an annulment.
Although people have surely been taking breaks since the beginning of time, the word “vacation” doesn’t show up in print until 1386, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” In his poem, the Wife of Bath describes how one of her husbands had a book about “wikked wyves.” The book tells about the most notorious wives in history, including Eve, Delilah, and Clytemnestra. The husband spends all his free time — his “leyser and vacacioun” — reading the book aloud to her as a form of torment.
(By the way, don’t worry about the Wife of Bath. She winds up ripping some of the pages out of her husband’s book, hitting him in the face, and convincing him to give her all of his estate.)
On another topic, I’ve talked before about our seemingly endless appetite for creating “portmanteaus” — words that mash together two parts of other words to make something new. Examples are “spork,” which combines “spoon” and “fork,” and “smog,” a combination of “smoke” and “fog.”
Well, people have also come up with some fun portmanteaus related to vacations. There’s “staycation,” time off when you don’t travel, but stay at home—to relax, do projects around the house, or enjoy the sights in your own hometown. There’s “fakation,” a vacation you contrive to take by falsely calling in sick to work. There are even “brocations” and “mancations,” guys-only getaways where you get to do … whatever it is guys do when they get together.
Then, of course, there’s “glamping.” This un-musical word is a mashup of “glamorous” and “camping.” It describes a luxurious outing very different from what you may have done as a Boy Scout or Girl Scout. Think of relaxing in a safari-size tent built on a wooden platform, sleeping in a four-poster bed with linen sheets, checking your phone via Wi-Fi, and sitting down to a gourmet meal provided by a personal chef. That is glamorous camping indeed.
There’s also a shortened word for vacation — “vacay” [V-A-C-A-Y]— that’s now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. If that upsets you, remember that dictionaries don’t exist to validate new words. Rather, they document new words that are being consistently used over an extended period of time.
That said, “vacay” is definitely a colloquial term. It’s fine in conversation and in writing that has a casual tone. But leave it out of your formal writing.
Another super-short way of referring to time off is “R&R,” with an ampersand between the two Rs and no spaces. This initialism is military shorthand for “rest and recuperation” or “rest and relaxation.”
There’s another expression for being out of town or unavailable that we hear a lot too — at least in the business world. It’s being “out of pocket.” This phrase sounds like newfangled jargon, but it actually appeared as early as 1908, in a short story by American author O. Henry.
There’s a similar phrase, “out of commission,” that suggests that someone is not available, no longer around, or taking an extended break. This expression alludes to a ship that’s been taken out of operation for repairs or held in reserve indefinitely.
Finally, there’s the way British people refer to their vacations. They talk about being “on holiday.” And fancy folk in general? They talk about “weekending” at different vacation spots.
Once again, that’s a phrase that sounds like modern jargon but was actually in use in the early 1900s. I guess some things never change — like our habit of turning nouns into verbs.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
And before we get to the familect, I want to kind of answer a question that came in a couple of years ago now because it's about a word I just used in this episode. Here we go:
"Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Meg Kelsey, and I'm an attorney in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I remember using your content when I was teaching English as a second language in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I've continued to reference your materials in practicing law throughout the past decade. Now I work at Regent Law School and the Center for Global Justice leading a clinic that provides free legal representation to human trafficking survivors. We help them expunge or remove from their record crimes that they were forced to commit while being trafficked. The question I have is how to pronounce the process used to vacate these convictions, which I heard pronounced vay-cater, vah-cater, va-catchur, etc., etc. Is there a right way to pronounce this word? Thank you so much."
Thank you so much, Meg. I'm sorry I don't always answer every question, but I often do remember them, and sometimes I actually do get to them after years go by. When your message came in, I looked the word up in a bunch of places, and none had a pronunciation — not Merriam-Webster, not the OED, not Black's Law Dictionary. Dictionary.com and American Heritage Dictionary didn't even have the word. Finally, when I was searching again for this episode, I found a video of U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor using the word, and she pronounced it "vay-kuh-tchur," so that is what I went with and would recommend in the absence of any other definitive source. Thanks for the question, and good luck with your work.
And finally, I have a familect story.
Hello, I have a familect example from my family in mid-Florida.
We, as a family, watched "The Gilmore Girls," and one of the things that we heard in it was, "Oi, with the poodles or are you feeling tired?"
So now, whenever one of us is tired, we would say, "Oi, with the poodles" or "There aren't enough poodles" which is kind of a funny thing.
Anyway, thank you, have a good day, bye.
Thanks so much, and for people who aren't familiar with that line from "Gilmore Girls," I found it on YouTube. Here's the original:
You know what I just realized? "Oi" is the funniest word in the entire world.
I mean, think about it. You never hear the word "oi" and not smile. Impossible. Funny, funny word.
Oh dear God.
"Poodle" is another funny word.
Please drink or drink, Lorelei.
In fact, if you put "oi" and "poodle" together in the same sentence, you'd have a great new catchphrase. You know, like, "Oi with the poodles already!"
So from now on, when the perfect circumstances arise, we will use our favorite new catchphrase.
Thanks again for the call!
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833-214-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from a nice, quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows. This week, the Modern Mentor is continuing her series on how to handle burnout if you're a manager. Again that's the Modern Mentor podcast.
Thanks to Nat Hoopes in Marketing; Morgan Christianson in advertising; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; and Dan Feierabend in audio, who is currently reading the "Warrior" series by Erin Hunter.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.