Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
something that brings one to alertness or out of sleep, 1965, often in the 1960s in reference to a shot of heroin in the morning. Phrase wake-up call is attested from 1968, originally a call one received from the hotel desk in the morning. Verbal phrase wake up is from 1530s; earlier the adverb was out (late 14c.)
Usage examples of "wake-up".
Our inwardness ended only with the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing of 2033, a real wake-up call.
Groggily Rees pulled himself from his sleeping net and moved slowly about the jumbled cabin, grinding through his wake-up routines.
That was the wake-up tube he now held loosely in his mouth: the Banzai Pipeline of soda straws.
It was Hennie Venter, the waiter from breakfast, doing the morning wake-up call.
He felt as if he had been asleep for hours-perhaps it was the billeting clerk pounding on his door because he got no answer on the wake-up call.
Silvina replied, chuckling as she left him to proceed with his wake-up routine.
You’d think that disaster with the Chut would’ve been a wake-up call, but it hasn’t improved a damn thing.
The murder of the Branch Davidians would indeed become a wake-up call for a citizenry concerned about an increasingly tyrannical, lawless government.
And she is with him now, next to the wake-up clock on the rattan table at his bedside in Bethania, watching with her vanished Irish smile as he drags off his sweat-drenched prison uniform and creeps into bed for a share of Louisa's blameless sleep.
They're so big their brains can cope with a human mind without much finessing, which means I don't have to spend most of my time remembering what I am or disguising my wake-up code as a ring.
That's only about six hours from now, so you might want to get rooms at the Lakeview Lodge here, and arrange for wake-up calls.
Wake-up at 6, breakfast at 7, school from 8 to 12, lunch till 12:30, rest till 1, school till 5, play till 6, then supper and study hall, in bed by 8.
McLanahan's wake-up call was the clatter of the SATCOM satellite communications transceiver's printer chugging to life as it spit out a long stream of messages onto a strip of thermal printer paper, like a grocery-store checkout receipt gone haywire.
Gavin persisted in his attempts to date her, phoning her at home, sometimes two dozen times a night, then extending his attempts to early-morning wake-up calls in which he wept and proclaimed his love for her.
One morning, she made a tape of Sandra snoring through our wake-up call just to prove we'd tried.