Etymology: Short for awaken, original past participle of awake v.; the full form occurs sporadically in 17th cent.

Etymology: In this, as in the simple wake v., two early verbs are mixed up; the form-history being complicated with that of awaken v., as the sense-history is with that of awecche v. 1. For the intransitive verb, Old English has awæcnan , awóc , awacen , compound of wæcnan , wóc , wacen , the present stem having a formative -n- , wak-n- . (Compare Gothic fraihn-an , frah , fraihans .) This present began already in Old English to be treated as a weak verb, with past tense awæcnede ; whence modern English awaken , awakened . As the earliest texts have onwæcnan , the a- in later Old English was probably = on- , not a- prefix¹ 2. Late Old English had also a weak verb awacian , awacode , in form a compound of wacian , wacode , to watch, keep awake, but in sense identical with awæcnan , and perhaps originating in a confusion of the two. This gave Middle and modern English awake , awaked . 3. After the weak awakened came into common use, as past tense of awaken v., the original relation of awoke and its past participle to that verb became obscured; and later instinct, in accordance with the general analogies of the language, has referred them to awake , treating them as strong equivalents of awaked . They are so included here. 4. Of all these forms the sense was in Old English only intransitive ‘to arise or come out of sleep,’ the transitive (causal) sense of ‘rouse from sleep’ being expressed by the derivative awęcc(e)an , Middle English awecche v., Gothic uswakjan, modern German erwecken; but soon after 1100 awake began to be used in this sense also, and at length superseded awecche, which is not found after 1300. There has been some tendency, especially in later times, to restrict the strong past tense and past participle to the original intransitive sense, and the weak inflection to the transitive sense, but this has never been fully carried out. 5. The strong past participle awaken was already in 13th cent. reduced to awake, and at length became merely an adjective (mostly predicative), after which a new form from the past tense, awoken, later awoke was substituted; but the weak awaked is also in common use. (Shakespeare used only the weak inflections.)