Linguistic Variation and Development of the Word Woke: A Corpus Study of American News Articles

Abstract

This study investigates the use of the term woke (adj.) in news articles from the United States. First, I outline the recent history of the word in terms of semantics. Woke was exclusively used in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) from the early 1900s to the 2010s and during that it referred to a state of awareness regarding racially biased police violence in the U.S. After this period, the term reached new audiences outside the Black communities which prompted an alteration in the definition of the term and caused it to include other social issues. Ultimately, the word woke was adopted by the political right in the U.S. and thus weaponized to undermine chiefly liberal political ideologies. This new purpose of the term is the one that is the most relevant for this study.

I utilized the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus to explore different morphological variations of the word woke. I selected the 200 most recent entries that included the word woke or any other form of it. The data consists of American news articles published and collected in March 2025. The results reveal eight different variations of the term woke which were mainly formed by derivation. Additionally, one aim of this study is to examine any changes that might have occurred to the word woke itself, and the results show that woke was also occasionally used as a noun. This new form and use of woke can be attributed to conversion, which is the process of a word acquiring a new part of speech without any morphological alterations. I also present the most frequent collocates that appeared after the word woke.