💬 Active or excited 🌅 Out of bed

astir

8.4

Awake and out of bed

adjective
/əˈstɜr/

Literature

: levantado

The children were astir early in the morning, ready for their school day.

Examples

I says to meself, "That's early for spring to be astir.

Peter Pan (2003)
She was happy to find her family astir when she woke up.
The kitchen was already astir.

Fiction book (1995)
By the time the sun rose, everyone in the house was astir and preparing breakfast.

Synonyms

vsastir

5 1.0

Awake and out of bed

describes specifically having gotten out of bed rather than being merely awake

Antonyms

asleep

∞ 1.0

Not awake and not aware

Surface Forms

astir positive

Morphology

astir = stir (semi-transparent) = a + stir

The word is built from the archaic prefix a- plus 'stir', and the sense of being up and moving is still partly guessable, though the prefix is not productive in modern English.

Etymology

Astir comes from the old prefix a- meaning 'on' or 'in' and the everyday verb stir, meaning 'move'. So to be astir is to be 'on the move', as when someone has got up from bed.