Grammar Girl here.

I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Today, wake up because we're going to talk about one of the trickiest words in the English

language.

And then, once we're fully awake, we'll kick back and talk about words for vacation.

What's the first thing you did this morning?

Well, unless you worked an overnight shift, chances are you woke up, or you awakened,

or awoke?

Which is it?

And why is it so hard to tell?

Well, linguists have a saying, every word has its own history.

And that history can affect current word meanings, pronunciations, and usages, and sometimes lead to confusion.

The big problem with wake is that it's not just one verb, but for, wake, waken, awake, and awaken,

each of which has intersected with the other three during the course of their history,

and they've had a lot of time because they go all the way back to Old English.

Wake and waken originally came from two different verbs.

Wakan, which means to come into being or to become awake, and Wassian, which meant to be awake.

But although their meanings were similar, the way we handled them wasn't. Wake is an irregular verb with original

past and participle forms woke and has waken. Well, waken is regular and forms its past and

participle in the usual way by adding ED. That's already confusing enough since the present tense regular form of one is the

participle of the other. But alongside these forms, people also started putting an A at the beginning,

saying to awake and to awaken. It's the same little A prefix we see on historical and regional forms like he was a

...