Skip to learning
Practice

Everyday English · Daily routines

Wake up

Stop sleeping; become awake.

You stop sleeping. Your eyes may open and you become aware of what is around you. You can still be lying in bed.

Plain-English lessonVisual explanation3 practice steps

01 · Picture the situation

Understand it in three steps

Cartoon of a woman awake in bed, looking at her ringing alarm clock.
Picture the meaningShe wakes up, but she is still in bed.
01Asleep
02Alarm rings
03Awake in bed

Imagine this: Asha is sleeping when her alarm rings. She opens her eyes but stays in bed. She has woken up; she has not got up yet.

02 · Hear it in everyday life

Examples you can use

Three natural sentences

  1. I wake up naturally before my alarm.
  2. The loud rain woke me up last night.
  3. Please wake your brother up at seven.

A short conversation

PERSON ADid you wake up early today?
PERSON BYes, but I stayed in bed until eight.

Read the conversation aloud. Then swap roles and try it again without looking.

03 · Build your sentence

How to use wake up

You can wake up yourself, or a sound or person can wake someone up. With a name, both “wake Sam up” and “wake up Sam” work. With a pronoun, put it in the middle: wake him up.

BASE FORMwake up
PAST SIMPLEwoke up
AFTER HAVE / HASwoken up

The base form is used after can, will and to. The past simple describes a finished past event. The third form follows have or has, for example when connecting an earlier action to now.

A common mistake to avoid

Use thisThe alarm woke me up.
Avoid this in this meaningThe alarm woke up me.

When me is the object, it goes between woke and up.

Do not confuse it: Waking up is the end of sleeping. Getting up is leaving the bed. “I woke up at six and got up at seven” is perfectly possible.

Does it have another meaning?

Wake up to something can also mean become aware of a situation. That is a different pattern from the sleeping meaning taught here.

Learn the meaning and sentence pattern together. Small words such as up and off do not have one fixed meaning in every expression.

04 · Make it stick

Try it for yourself

Choose an answer before opening the explanation. Then make a sentence about your own life.

1. The alarm rings. You open your eyes but stay in bed. What happened?
  1. You went to bed
  2. You woke up
  3. You left the house
Check answer 1

B. You woke up

You stopped sleeping, so you woke up.

2. Please ___ at six.
  1. wake up me
  2. wake me up
  3. woke me up
Check answer 2

B. wake me up

Use wake me up in a request. The pronoun me belongs in the middle.

3. Your turn

How is waking up different from getting up?

See a possible model and self-check

I wake up naturally before my alarm.

This is one model, not the only correct answer. Check that your sentence uses the meaning taught here, the right verb form and the word order above. Change the person, place or time to make it your own.