totului

Totului is a term in the Romanian language describing a particular grammatical form of the pronoun totul, which means “everything” or “the whole.” Totului represents the genitive and dative singular form of totul and is used in contexts that require the oblique case. The base element tot is related to the Latin totus, meaning “all” or “whole,” and totul as a neuter substantive reflects a fused form that can function as a pronoun in the nominative/accusative or as a dependent form in other cases.

In theoretical grammar, totul acts as a definite, generic reference to the totality of something, either concrete or abstract. The oblique totului is encountered in constructions involving possession, prepositional phrases, or indirect objects, where the noun or pronoun governing the case is inflected accordingly. The use of totului is relatively limited in everyday speech, and speakers often opt for the simpler totul, the noun total, or related terms like întregul when conveying the sense of wholeness.

Semantically, totului denotes the totality or entirety of a referent, overlapping with terms such as totalitate (totality) and întregime (wholeness). It can appear in formal, literary, or scholarly Romanian, where precise case marking is more common. The word’s etymology traces back to Latin totus, passing into Romanian as part of the core vocabulary describing wholeness and entirety.