puoliso

Puoliso is a Finnish noun meaning spouse. The term is gender-neutral and refers to the person who is married to or in a legally recognized partnership with another person. It can denote a husband, a wife, or a partner within marriage or an equivalent relationship.

In everyday language and in official contexts, puoliso is used to indicate a person’s spouse without specifying gender. It appears on forms, legal documents, and in communications related to family life and civil matters. The word helps avoid gendered terms when discussing relationships and household responsibilities.

The word is inflected like other Finnish nouns. The plural form is puolisot. Possession is expressed with standard personal suffixes, for example puolisoni (my spouse), puolisosi (your spouse), puolisonensa (his/her spouse). The genitive form puolison denotes “the spouse’s” in phrases such as puolison nimi (the spouse’s name). Puoliso can also be used in plural phrases to refer to both spouses in a couple, as in he ovat puolisoineen, depending on sentence structure.

Puoliso is commonly used across contexts, including family life discussions, administrative language, and media reporting, to refer to a person’s partner in a way that is not tied to gender or to a specific status beyond marriage or registered partnership. It remains a standard, neutral term in Finnish for describing a close relational partner within legally recognized relationships.