These words all refer to emerging from sleep. Four of these verbs, wake , waken , awake , awaken , are so closely connected that their inflected forms are, for the most part, used interchangeably. Certain distinctions of taste can be felt in some cases. A tendency has been noted to prefer awake and awaken in figurative use: His suspicions were awakened ; a country awakening to new challenges. Awake may be preferred in referring to the condition of wakefulness or alertness: I am fully awake . In reference to the emergence from sleep itself, wake is most common: I wake at seven each morning.

In other cases, little distinction exists among these for words. Thus one may say I woke , awoke , wakened or awakened . The forms I waked and I awaked are also heard, although much less commonly; waked is sometimes reserved for transitive constructions: I waked him at noon. All these forms are acceptable; all mean the same thing. The most common past tense, however, is woke . Wakened and awakened are usually felt to be more formal, although they seem to be the preferred forms for passive constructions: I was awakened by a loud noise. Woke and woken are accepted as standard forms in English. Awoken is seldom used. For the past participle, waked is probably the simplest and most direct, but many people avoid this form as questionable or uncomfortable and use the more natural-sounding awakened .

• I generally wake early, but yesterday I woke two hours later than usual. In fact, I have not awakened so late in years.

Wake up gives the most informal or emphatic tone of any of these forms.

• She had to wake up several times a night when their baby was ill; Wake up !

It retains its informal flavour in transitive use: I volunteered to wake her up .

Rise is most often used to refer strictly to the daily act of waking and getting out of bed.

• They rose early that morning; Rise and shine!

Sometimes it can make a distinction between waking and getting up .

• She woke at dawn but didn’t rise for another hour.

Unlike rise , rouse cannot be used intransitively, although in reflexive constructions it can suggest a difficult or slow act of awaking or emerging from a quiescent state: He struggled to rouse himself from sleep. By contrast, the word can suggest, in the passive, an easy waking, as from a light sleep: roused by the birds singing outside his window. In the active voice, the word can stress the effort to awaken someone else: trying unsuccessfully to rouse him from his nightmare.