Word.ws English Dictionary

woke up

woke up is the simple past of wake up.

Meaning of wake up

Verb

wake up (third-person singular simple present wakes up, present participle waking up, simple past woke up or waked up, past participle woken up or waked up)

  1. (intransitive) To stop sleeping; to awake.
    • I made a speaking trumpet of my hands and commenced to whoop “Ahoy!” and “Hello!” at the top of my lungs. […] The Colonel woke up, and, after asking what in brimstone was the matter, opened his mouth and roared “Hi!” and “Hello!” like the bull of Bashan.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
  2. (transitive) To awaken somebody.
    • Wake your brother up; it's time for school.
  3. (intransitive) To become more aware of a real-life situation; to concentrate on the matter in hand.
    • Some businesses were slow to wake up to the importance of the Internet.

Questions about woke up

What is woke up the simple past of?
Woke up is the simple past of wake up.

Words near woke up in the dictionary

  1. woke Olympics
  2. woke right
  3. woke supremacist
  4. woke supremacists
  5. woke supremacy
  6. woke up
  7. woke up and smelled the ashes
  8. woke up and smelled the coffee
  9. woke up and smelled the roses
  10. woke up and smelt the ashes
  11. woke up and smelt the coffee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: woke up (page history and authors); wake up (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: “woke up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/woke_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.