A Word, Please: ‘Wake’ variations may awaken confusion

One day not long ago, Steve in Burbank woke to find a newspaper on his doorstep. Or perhaps he awakened. Or maybe he just woke up. I suppose it’s possible he even awaked. I don’t know. And neither does Steve. Which is why he found my email address in the paper and wrote to me: “Please straighten me (and maybe others) out on the usage of ‘wake’ and ‘awake.’”

I’d be happy to, if only it were that easy. “Wake” and “awake” themselves need straightening out. And when you toss in “awaken” and “wake up,” you see that English is all over the map about what to call it when a person stops being asleep.

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Let’s start by looking at “awake” and “awaken,” and let’s focus only of the verb and not the adjective form seen in “He is awake.” It might come as a surprise to you that “awake” is a verb at all. You may have never heard anyone say, “Let’s awake early tomorrow.”

In fact, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, “awake” is more standard as a verb than it is as an adjective. And it works as both a transitive and an intransitive verb. Transitive verbs take direct objects, which are nouns that receive the action, like Jim in “You need to awake Jim.” Intransitive verbs take no objects, as in “You need to awake.”

Yes, I know those examples sound like a poor attempt to pass myself off as a dowager countess. But they’re legit nonetheless.

“Awaken” sounds a bit more natural, which is ironic when you consider that it evolved from a past participle of an older verb. Imagine that people suddenly started saying, “Careful not to broken that window” or “I’ll brought the soft drinks” and you’ll have the general idea. Like the verb “awake,” “awaken” can be transitive or intransitive.

The verb “wake” is yet another way to say the same thing. “He wakes early every day.” Like its siblings, “wake” can be intransitive or transitive: “He wakes his mother early every day.”

But three choices apparently aren’t enough, because we rely most heavily on a fourth: wake up.

This looks a lot like something we call a phrasal verb — a combination verb with preposition in which the pairing creates a new meaning that the verb alone doesn’t convey. Think about “give up,” “blow up” and “break up,” as well as “give in,” “carry on” and “check out.”

Take away the preposition from any of these phrasal verbs and you end up with a different meaning. “To give up” means something very different from “to give.” “Blow up” is different from “blow,” “give in” is different from “give,” and so on.

The “up” in “wake up” doesn’t substantially change the meaning: “wake” means pretty much the same thing without it. Yet for some reason, the extra preposition is preferred by American English speakers.

Weird as these four verbs are in the present tense, their past tenses are even nuttier. If today you wake, then yesterday you, what? Waked or woke? The answer: Both are correct (though “woke” is more common). What if today you awake? Well, then you wouldn’t say that yesterday you awaken. You awaked. If you’re working with awaken, that’s just the present tense. Its past form is “awakened.”

“The past-tense and past-participial forms of ‘wake’ and its various siblings are perhaps the most vexing in the language,” writes Garner’s Modern American Usage.

If you want to use wake, awake, awaken or wake up in the past tense and you’re not sure how, check a dictionary. After the entry word, you’ll see the simple past tense followed by the past participle (which is the one that works with a form of have, like “In the past, I have waked”).

Or, if you prefer, you can go the easy route and just use “wake up” and its easy past forms “woke up” and “woken up.”

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.