Word.ws English Dictionary

waker

waker adjective: watchful; vigilant; alert.

Adjective

waker (comparative more waker, superlative most waker)

  1. (UK, dialectal) Watchful; vigilant; alert.

Noun

waker (plural wakers)

  1. One who wakens or arouses from sleep.
    • an early waker
  2. One who wakes somebody or something.
  3. (non-native speakers) An alarm clock.
  4. In the Rust programming language, a handle that "wakes up" a task by notifying its executor that it is ready to be run.

Proper noun capitalized: Waker

Waker (plural Wakers)

  1. A surname transferred from the nickname.

Forms of waker

Adjective
comparativemore waker
superlativemost waker
Noun
pluralwakers
Proper noun
pluralWakers

Origin of waker

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.

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

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

Questions about waker

What does waker mean?
Waker means watchful; vigilant; alert.
What part of speech is waker?
Waker can be an adjective, a noun or a proper noun.

Words near waker in the dictionary

  1. wakening
  2. wakenings
  3. wakens
  4. wakeover
  5. wakeovers
  6. waker
  7. waker-upper
  8. waker-uppers
  9. Wakerley
  10. wakerobin
  11. wakerobins

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: waker (page history and authors); Waker (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “waker.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/waker. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.