What Is Woke? : A Corpus-Based Analysis of its Use in Reddit

The word woke has its origins in African American Vernacular English. While theorigins of the word can be traced back to the early 20th century, woke reenteredcommon parlance in the 2010’s during the Black Lives Matter movement. Initiallyassociated with the awareness and pursuit of social justice and mostly used in leftleaningcircles, woke began appearing in discourses from political actors on the rightand the word became a pejorative descriptor. However, the meaning of woke remains acontested issue. This essay examines the use of the word in the social media platformReddit, specifically comments posted to message boards where political issues arediscussed by users during the year 2024. A corpus-based analysis revealed the mostfrequent collocates of the word. Using these collocates as a starting point and using thediscourse-historical approach, comments containing the most frequent collocates wererandomly selected and analyzed, paying close attention to the use of woke as it relates tothe discursive strategies used by the authors.