wake
Three "wakes" in modern English: the morning verb, the vigil over the dead, the trail behind a ship. Two of them are the same word. The third isn't. The original sense wasn't the morning one — Old English wacian meant "to remain awake," to keep watch, and the funeral wake preserves that older meaning almost untouched. The boat's wake is a separate word entirely, from Middle Low German wake, "an opening in ice."
The modern verb does three jobs that look unrelated. You wake up in the morning. You go to a wake when someone has died. A ship leaves a wake behind it. Most native speakers carry the three senses around without noticing they share a spelling. Two of them share more than that — they share a root, and one preserves the older meaning almost intact. The third is a different word entirely; it converged on the same spelling by accident, and the two streams in the language never meet underneath.
The two that share a root come from Old English wacian, "to remain awake," and its noun wacu, "the watch kept." The original sense wasn't the morning verb. It was vigilance — sustained presence in the dark. The night-watchman waked. The shepherd waked over a sick lamb. The funeral wake preserves this almost untouched: you don't wake up at a wake, you stay awake at one. The body has crossed a threshold; the gathered keep watch on this side through the night. To hold a wake is to keep one going — pastoral verb on pastoral noun, both intact. The morning verb is the late branch. The active sense (to remain alert) grew an inchoative shadow (to become alert), and the shadow eventually swallowed the verb's daily use. We still feel the older shape in compounds — awaken someone's conscience, the wakeful night, a wake-up call — but ordinary morning wake is now about transition out of sleep, not vigilance held through it.
The third wake, the boat's, is a different etymon. It entered English in the mid-16th century from Middle Low German wake, "a hole or opening in the ice" — the path a ship cut through frozen water, which then generalized to any disturbed water trailing a vessel. Same spelling, different root, no shared meaning underneath. The two waters in the language never meet at the bottom; they just happen to look alike on the surface. The PIE root *weg- behind the vigil-wake is also the root underneath vigil, vigorous, watch, and (by a longer route) vegetable — the whole cluster names what is alive, alert, lively. Wake-the-trail is outside that family. It comes from the opposite image: not what is awake, but what is opened — the gap a moving thing leaves behind it.
- watch — OE wæcce, the same PIE root narrowed to the noun for the keeping; the everyday Modern English verb is the same word
- vigil — Latin vigilia, "a watching, a wakefulness"; from vigil, "awake" — the Latin branch of *weg-
- vigilant — Latin vigilantem, present participle of vigilare; same root, adjective form
- vigor / vigorous — Latin vigere, "to be lively, to thrive"; the root in its aliveness sense
- vegetable — Latin vegere (variant of vigere); the thing that grows, before it became the thing on the plate
- awake / awaken — OE āwacian, āweccan; prefixed verbs from the same root, intensifying the active sense
- bivouac — French bivouac, from Swiss German Beiwacht, "double-watch"; same Germanic wacht- family as watch
- wake (boat) — Middle Low German wake, "opening in ice" — different word entirely; convergence on the spelling, not kinship