syötävän

Syötävä is a Finnish term meaning edible or fit to be eaten. It can function as an adjective describing something that can be eaten, or as a noun referring to an edible item or food in general. In everyday use, you may hear phrases like “se on syötävää” or “otatko tästä syötävää,” which show its noun usage in partitive form.

The word has several grammatical forms. The nominative form is syötävä. The partitive form, used when referring to an unspecified amount of edible matter, is syötävää (as in “Ota tästä syötävää”). The genitive singular form, which marks possession or association, is syötävän, used in phrases such as “syötävän koko” (the edible’s size) or “syötävän laatua” (the edible’s quality). The forms arise from Finnish inflection rules for adjectives used as nouns or for nouns that describe edible items.

Usage and nuance. Syötävä is neutral and common in standard Finnish. It is appropriate in both everyday speech and formal contexts when discussing food safety, suitability for eating, or describing the nature of something that can be eaten. It can appear in compound constructions like “syötävän kokoinen pala” (a piece of edible size) or in sentences stating whether something is suitable to eat, such as “tämä on syötävää” or “tästä saa syötävää.”

Etymology. The term derives from the verb syödä, meaning to eat, with the suffixes that create the adjective and noun forms indicating eatability.

See also: syötävä (base form), ruokavalio-related terms, edible vs. inedible distinctions in Finnish.