awaken

verb

Etymology: From Middle English awakenen or awaknen, from Old English awæcnan or awæcnian, from a- plus wæcnan or wæcnian.

1. To cause to become awake.

   “Be careful how you touch her, she'll awaken / As sleep's the only freedom all that she knows / And when you walk into her eyes, you won't believe / The way she's always paying for a debt she never owes”

2. To stop sleeping; awake.

   “Each morning he awakens with a smile on his face.”

   “For this growing set, the idea that we might have a fixed, natural lifespan is pure defeatism—“deathism” even, a spell from which we must awaken to realise our full potential.”

3. To bring into action (something previously dormant); to stimulate.

   “Awaken your entrepreneurial spirit!”

   “We hope to awaken your interest in our programme.”

4. Of something previously dormant, to become active.

   “I'll miss the sea. But a person needs new experiences. They draw something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

5. To call to a sense of sin.
6. past participle of awake

   “[This ant] I ſuffered to lye above an hour in the Spirit; and after I had taken it out, and put its body and legs into a natural poſture, remained moveleſs about an hour; but then , upon a ſudden, as if it had been awaken out of a drunken ſleep, it ſuddenly reviv'd and ran away...”

7. To cause to become aware.
8. To become aware.

   “I suddenly awoke to the possibilities of the new invention.”

   “[S]he pointedly remarked that they had just moved to the city a month previous, that they were dissatisfied, and would return to Hoosierdom in June. I was completely taken in, and departed without making the assessment. However, when whole flatsful began to make similar explanations under similar circumstances, I awoke to the fact that I had been bluffed.”