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Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. It is synonymous with the General American English word awake. The phrase stay woke has been used in African American English since the 1930s.
Its use during that era would have been perceived as a quaint or ironic use of bygone slang: part of the dated 1960s lexicon along with words such as "groovy". The perception of the word "rave" changed again in the late 1980s when the term was revived and adopted by a new youth culture, possibly inspired by the use of the term in Jamaica. [13]
Slang used or popularized by Generation Z (Gen Z; generally those born between the late 1990s and late 2000s in the Western world) differs from slang of earlier generations; [1] [2] ease of communication via Internet social media has facilitated its rapid proliferation, creating "an unprecedented variety of linguistic variation". [2] [3] [4]
The newer meaning of the word has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which now defines it as being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts ...
“I think [woke is] an unusable word — although it is used all the time — because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang ...
The word "woke" is tossed around a lot in political and social debates all around the country. It's ramping up as Election Day draws near. The term carries different meanings and strong emotional ...
African American slang is formed by words and phrases that are regarded as informal. It involves combining, shifting, shortening, blending, borrowing, and creating new words. African American slang possess all of the same lexical qualities and linguistic mechanisms as any other language. AAVE slang is more common in speech than it is in writing ...
While there was some agreement on the definition of “woke,” Americans are more sharply divided over whether the word is a compliment or an insult, pollsters said. Forty percent said it is an ...