Waker

adj, name, noun

adj, name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    One who wakens or arouses from sleep.

    "an early waker"

  2. 2
    a person who awakes wordnet
  3. 3
    One who wakes somebody or something.
  4. 4
    someone who rouses others from sleep wordnet
  5. 5
    An alarm clock.
Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    In the Rust programming language, a handle that "wakes up" a task by notifying its executor that it is ready to be run.
Adjective
  1. 1
    Watchful; vigilant; alert. UK, dialectal
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname transferred from the nickname.

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English wakyr, from Old English wacor, waccor (“watchful, vigilant”), from Proto-West Germanic *wakr, from Proto-Germanic *wakraz (“awake, watchful”), equivalent to wake + -er. Cognate with Scots wakir (“watchful”), Dutch wakker (“awake”), German wacker (“awake, alert, capable, brave”), Swedish vacker (“wakeful, watchful, fair, comely”). Also precisely cognate with Sanskrit वज्र (vájra, “adamantine”), both ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wóǵ-ros (“strong, lively”), and therefore a doublet of vajra. Further related through the same Indo-European root to vigil, vigor, and vegetable.

Etymology 2

From Middle English wakere, equivalent to wake + -er. Compare West Frisian wekker (“alarm clock”, literally “waker”), Dutch wekker, German Wecker.

Etymology 3

Either from waker, a nickname for a watchful person, or a variant of Walker.

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