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waking up and smelling the coffee

waking up and smelling the coffee is the present participle and gerund of wake up and smell the coffee.

Meaning of wake up and smell the coffee

Verb

wake up and smell the coffee (third-person singular simple present wakes up and smells the coffee, present participle waking up and smelling the coffee, simple past woke up and smelled the coffee or woke up and smelt the coffee, past participle woken up and smelled the coffee or woken up and smelt the coffee)

  1. (Philippines, US, idiomatic, informal) Often in the infinitive or imperative: to face reality and stop deluding oneself.
    • Your paper gains "notice" as an example of the use of English as it should not be written nor spoken. Wake up and smell the coffee.1927 June 4, Purist [pseudonym], “Smelling the coffee [letter]”, in John S[hivley] Knight, editor, Akron Beacon Journal, number 157, Akron, Oh.: Beacon Journal Co., →OCLC, page 4, column 5
    Synonyms:
    open one's eyes, take the hint, wake up and smell the ashes, wake up and smell the decaf, wake up and smell the roses

Questions about waking up and smelling the coffee

What is waking up and smelling the coffee the present participle and gerund of?
Waking up and smelling the coffee is the present participle and gerund of wake up and smell the coffee.

Words near waking up and smelling the coffee in the dictionary

  1. waking dreams
  2. waking life
  3. waking lives
  4. waking up
  5. waking up and smelling the ashes
  6. waking up and smelling the coffee
  7. waking up and smelling the roses
  8. waking up dead
  9. waking up on the wrong side of bed
  10. waking up one day
  11. wakingly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: waking up and smelling the coffee (page history and authors); wake up and smell the coffee (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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