How to Use woke in a Sentence

woke

adjective
  • School has turned him very woke.
    — Charlie Dektar, New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2025
  • The stress on this anti-woke, it’s just done so much harm.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 20 May 2026
  • The answer is the website became woke.
    — Ben Smith, semafor.com, 16 Jan. 2026
  • Musk was pilloried by the woke crowd for making this an issue.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes.com, 9 Sep. 2025
  • Ainsley is at college busy straddling the lines betwen woke and not-woke.
    — Paul Tassi, Forbes.com, 19 Jan. 2026
  • What Anthropic is saying here is not like some woke, left-wing wild thing.
    — Brian Barrett, Wired News, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Trump says the Smithsonian is too woke.
    — Brieanna J. Frank, USA Today, 4 Sep. 2025
  • Trump says the Smithsonian is too woke.
    — Brieanna J. Frank, USA Today, 8 Sep. 2025
  • In fact, looking back on those early days, Superman was very woke.
    — Jay Michaelson, Rolling Stone, 28 June 2023
  • This is the same party, the same group of people who complained about, ‘Everything is too woke!
    — Glenn Garner, Deadline, 17 Sep. 2025
  • But critics from the media and the political left have decried her anti-woke stances.
    — Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune, 17 Nov. 2025
  • In his elliptical way, Musk was expressing a desire to trace the spread of the woke mind virus.
    — Literary Hub, 20 Apr. 2026
  • The ongoing war between woke and anti-woke factions is a fatuous melodrama best left to the satirists.
    — Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 29 June 2026
  • She was criticized on social media from the right and the left, for being both too woke and not confrontational enough.
    — Matthew Futterman, New York Times, 21 Apr. 2026
  • Republicans had called that a woke policy that hurts retirees' pockets.
    — Taylor Wilson, USA TODAY, 21 Mar. 2023
  • And now the supercilious Ivy League twits try to dodge the consequences of their woke follies.
    — Howie Carr, Boston Herald, 24 Dec. 2025
  • The party is still seen as weak on immigration, untrustworthy on the economy, and too woke.
    — Chris Smith, Vanity Fair, 16 Feb. 2026
  • But those currently running the Pentagon (into the ground) say the too-big-for-its-britches news outfit has gone woke.
    — Editorial Board, Washington Post, 22 Jan. 2026
  • Woke scolds and anti-woke dolts alike objected to the image of Carpenter kneeling in front of a man who appears to be using her hair as a leash.
    — Bethy Squires, Vulture, 29 Aug. 2025
  • Replace the traditional media with woke media.
    — Joe Kinsey Outkick, FOXNews.com, 23 Apr. 2026
  • But instead of asking that, Wu is plowing ahead with a 4% increase in the city budget while not targeting any of her woke initiatives.
    — Joe Battenfeld, Boston Herald, 4 Dec. 2025
  • But Democrats, liberal judges, and weak prosecutors would rather push a woke, soft-on-crime agenda than lock up violent offenders.
    — Gabe Whisnant, MSNBC Newsweek, 9 Sep. 2025
  • Can the owner of a popular anti-woke, pro-Israel Substack save one of the country’s oldest news channels?
    — Max Tani, semafor.com, 8 Sep. 2025
  • Some conservatives would argue that this agenda has always been partisan, shaped by the woke ideology of the Democrats.
    — Eyal Press, New Yorker, 29 Oct. 2025
  • Find out how to incite moral panic over otherwise inconsequential morsels of pop culture, such as which movie characters are Black and which brands are too woke.
    — Skyler Higley, The New Yorker, 13 Aug. 2023
  • Some skeptics may doubt this, and point to how quickly the spirits of the time can change; see the rise and fall of the woke movement from 2020 to 2025.
    — Abby McCloskey, Twin Cities, 5 Feb. 2026
  • Finally, Musk used that AI model to write an anti-woke encyclopedia.
    — Matteo Wong, The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2025
  • In between are the companies themselves, simultaneously accused of being too woke and not progressive enough.
    — Laurent Belsie, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 Apr. 2023
  • Or the right woke wing, which is like, everything is a conspiracy, any use of technology is actually going to only be used to eviscerate and attack us?
    — Steven Levy, Wired News, 10 Nov. 2025
  • From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat's traitorous America Last policies, we are done.
    — Isabella Murray, ABC News, 23 Feb. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'woke.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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