Etsitään

Etsitään is the present passive (impersonal) form of the Finnish verb etsiä, meaning "to search" or "to look for." As a verb form it is used to indicate that an action is carried out without specifying a particular agent, or to make a collective suggestion equivalent to "let's look for." Depending on context, etsitään is commonly translated into English as "is being sought," "let's look for," or simply "wanted" in short notices.

Morphologically, etsitään combines the verb stem etsi- with the passive present ending -tään, and it occurs frequently in everyday speech, public notices and advertising. Typical uses include requests and classifieds (e.g., "Etsitään työntekijää" — "Help wanted/Employee sought"), police bulletins ("Kadonnutta henkilöä etsitään" — "A missing person is being searched for"), and collaborative suggestions ("Etsitään ratkaisua" — "Let's look for a solution").

The form can carry ambiguity between an impersonal passive and a hortative meaning; context and syntactic cues normally resolve interpretation. Negation is formed per regular Finnish patterns (e.g., "ei etsitä" — "is not being searched for"). Etsitään exemplifies how Finnish marks agentless actions and communal proposals through specific verb morphology.