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I was thinking about if there is a word like "waker" and what meanings it has, or how would people feel about it if they heard it.

Can we call the person who wakes others up a waker?

And if I call a person an early waker or an every day waker, can it also mean that he is a person who wakes up (himself) early/every day? Like if he is using some alarm clock app every day for waking up, can we call him a daily waker?

Do you think the word has both meanings, the word does not exist or the word has only the first meaning?

Thanks :)

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The verb wake is both transitive and intransitive. In the same way, the agent noun waker can mean:

  1. waker - someone who rouses others from sleep.

  2. waker - a person who awakes; "an early waker"

(thefreedictionary.com)

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  • As Reg Dwight has said, '[W]e write stuff in comments that is too obvious to qualify for an answer. [This (the mere looking up of a word)] is not really a suitable answer on a site for linguists and etymologists....'
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Oct 7, 2017 at 15:54
  • This is a legitimate answer and it is actually very appropriate.
    – fralau
    Oct 7, 2017 at 16:03
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    @fraulau When did LMGTFY responses become acceptable answers? ELU is aimed at linguists and etymologists. ELL is for more basic questions, and they'd have probably not wanted a question lacking such basic research there either.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Oct 7, 2017 at 16:13
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These answers are right. But, as with everything written, it depends on the context.

Simply put, wake is a verb - for now. It's not a noun in the way you want to use it. There's no such thing as a waker (as in a person), unless you found it in some royal court or something. Seriously, someone probably did have to wake up His/Her Highness. That person probably had a title. Hmmm, Lord of the Awakening?We have examples of that now. The verb marry has noun forms that are titles: priest, justice of the peace, rabbi, etc. However, there is no "marrier". It's not hard to make the conversion from wake to waker. Most English verbs have a noun counterpart. Think jog/jogger, sleep/sleeper, and kill/killer.

You can look up the accepted noun use. It's a dead person's remembrance party before burial and the turbulence caused by ships and airplanes as they traverse their routes.

However, don't count "waker" out just yet. A quick look at the OED shows that "misconstructor" was added in 2002.

Back to context... if you're writing a poem or a song then you have poetic license. Again, a quick search for "poem containing the word 'Waker'" brings up Sir Thomas Wyatt using it. There's also some song on YouTube that uses it as its title to refer to a person.

Bottom line though, I wouldn't try using it in Scrabble.

Forgot to ask, are you in the U.K.? "Waker", spoken, is dangerously close to "wanker" - British slang for jerkin' off.

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  • Wordnet licenses the 'someone who rouses others from sleep' usage. As mahmud koya had already mentioned.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Oct 7, 2017 at 21:48
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    Scrabble is about the only place I’d use it.
    – Jim
    Oct 8, 2017 at 17:23

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