terveistä

Terveistä is a Finnish word that functions as the elative plural form of the adjective terve, meaning healthy or sound. In Finnish, adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in number and case, so when the head noun is in the elative plural, the adjective takes the elative plural ending, giving terveistä.

The elative case expresses origin, source, or reference from within something, roughly translating to “from among” or “of.” Therefore terveistä is used to describe something that comes from or is attributed to the healthy ones, and it is most commonly seen with nouns in the elative plural. Examples include terveistä ihmisistä (“from the healthy people”) and terveistä eläimistä (“from the healthy animals”). The form tends to appear in more formal or literary contexts and is less common in everyday speech, where other constructions are often used.

Compared with related forms, terveitä is the partitive plural form used when the adjective modifies a noun in the partitive, such as terveitä ihmisiä (“healthy people” as a direct object). Terve is the base form, terveet is the nominative plural, and so on.

In usage, terveistä should be matched with a noun that is in the elative plural. The term is primarily a grammatical inflection noted in linguistic descriptions and may be encountered in formal writing rather than casual conversation.