What is Spurious Wakeup while wait() in Threads?

According to Wikipedia article on spurious wakeups has this tidbit:

The pthread_cond_wait() function in Linux is implemented using the futex system call. Each blocking system call on Linux returns abruptly with EINTR when the process receives a signal. ...pthread_cond_wait() can't restart the waiting because it may miss a real wakeup in the little time it was outside the futex system call. This race condition can only be avoided by the caller checking for an invariant. A POSIX signal will therefore generate a spurious wakeup.

For understanding what is spurious wakeup this is java doc comment from Object.java :

     * A thread can also wake up without being notified, interrupted, or
     * timing out, a so-called <i>spurious wakeup</i>.  While this will rarely
     * occur in practice, applications must guard against it by testing for
     * the condition that should have caused the thread to be awakened, and
     * continuing to wait if the condition is not satisfied.  In other words,
     * waits should always occur in loops, like this one:
     * <pre>
     *     synchronized (obj) {
     *         while (&lt;condition does not hold&gt;)
     *             obj.wait(timeout);
     *         ... // Perform action appropriate to condition
     *     }
     * </pre>