czego

Czego is the genitive singular form of the Polish interrogative pronoun co, meaning "what." It is not a separate lexical item with a different meaning; rather, it is the inflected form used when the word "what" operates in the genitive case. In practice, czeg o appears in questions and in subordinate clauses where the governing word requires a genitive object or complement.

In direct questions, czego is used to ask about something in contexts needing the genitive: for example, "Czego potrzebujesz?" (What do you need?) or "Czego się boisz?" (What are you afraid of?). It also occurs in subordinate clauses after verbs that take a genitive object, such as "potrzebować czego" (to need something) or "obawiać się czego" (to fear something), and in phrases like "brak czego" (a lack of something); the construction can be extended to various sentence types.

Czego is also used after prepositions that govern the genitive, including "bez czego" (without what), "z czego" (from what), or "do czego" (to what). It can introduce relative clauses and set phrases such as "to, czego potrzebujesz" (that which you need).

Pronunciation and etymology: czego is pronounced roughly as "CHEH-go." Etymologically, it is the genitive form of co, which comes from the Polish corpus of interrogatives descended from Proto-Slavic *čьto; cognates appear in other Slavic languages (Russian čего, Czech čeho). In modern Polish, czego is a standard grammatical form used across registers to express questions and dependent clauses requiring genitive.