What it means: A wake is a gathering of people who come together to celebrate the life of someone who has died. What it means: Okay, so this one isn't really much of a saying because a wake is a literal thing, but it has a very interesting back story. The reason that people have wakes is because people were often pronounced as dead when they were simply unconscious. When people's graves were dug back up (for the sake of letting their relatives be buried with them or to reuse the coffins and the actual grave), some coffins were seen to have had scratch marks on the inside, meaning that people were being buried alive. Therefore relatives would hold a wake to give the person enough time to literally wake up before they were buried.
