postului

Postului is a Romanian inflected form: the genitive/dative singular of the masculine noun post. The noun post has two main meanings in Romanian. One sense refers to a job or official position within an organization or institution. The other sense denotes a period of religious fasting, common in Orthodox and Catholic contexts. Because Romanian uses genitive and dative to express possession or relation, postului appears in phrases that link the post to another noun.

In the job sense, postului is used to indicate attributes connected to the position, such as its duties or characteristics. In the fasting sense, it expresses aspects of the fast, such as its duration or requirements. Typical examples include: îndatoririle postului (the duties of the post) and durata postului (the duration of the fast). The nominative forms are post (indefinite) and postul (definite); postului occurs only in genitive/dative contexts.

Context is essential to determine meaning, since postului can refer either to a professional post or to a period of fasting depending on surrounding words. While the two senses share the same morphological form, they belong to distinct semantic fields and are not interchangeable without clarification.