Awaken

//əˈweɪkən// verb

verb ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To cause to become awake. transitive

    "Be careful how you touch her, she'll awaken / As sleep's the only freedom all that she knows / And when you walk into her eyes, you won't believe / The way she's always paying for a debt she never owes"

  2. 2
    stop sleeping wordnet
  3. 3
    To stop sleeping; awake. intransitive

    "Each morning he awakens with a smile on his face."

  4. 4
    cause to become awake or conscious wordnet
  5. 5
    To bring into action (something previously dormant); to stimulate. figuratively, transitive

    "Awaken your entrepreneurial spirit!"

Show 5 more definitions
  1. 6
    make aware wordnet
  2. 7
    To call to a sense of sin.
  3. 8
    past participle of awake form-of, participle, past, rare

    "[This ant] I ſuffered to lye above an hour in the Spirit; and after I had taken it out, and put its body and legs into a natural poſture, remained moveleſs about an hour; but then , upon a ſudden, as if it had been awaken out of a drunken ſleep, it ſuddenly reviv'd and ran away..."

  4. 9
    To cause to become aware. figuratively, transitive
  5. 10
    To become aware. figuratively, intransitive

    "I suddenly awoke to the possibilities of the new invention."

Synonyms

All synonyms
arouseawakerousewakewake upwaken

Example

More examples

"This book will awaken your imagination."

Etymology

From Middle English awakenen or awaknen, from Old English awæcnan or awæcnian, from a- plus wæcnan or wæcnian.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.