virhettä

Virhettä is the partitive singular form of the Finnish noun virhe, which means a mistake, error, or fault. Virhe is a basic term used across everyday language and technical contexts to refer to misjudgments, miscalculations, defects in equipment, or faults in processes. The form virhettä appears in constructions that require the partitive case, such as after postpositions or negation, for example ilman virhettä (“without error”) or ei ole virhettä (“there is no error”). The plural form virheitä is used when speaking of multiple mistakes.

In ordinary speech, virhe can refer to personal mistakes in judgment or action, as well as to defects in objects or systems. In technical domains, the word is common in compounds: virhekoodi (error code), virheilmoitus (error message), and virheellinen (faulty, erroneous). Related forms include virheellinen (faulty or erroneous), virheellisesti (wrongly, incorrectly), and virheettömästi (without mistakes, flawlessly). The adjective virheetön means flawless or without faults. These derivatives help describe the quality of a result, a device, or a decision.

Etymology-wise, virhe is a native Finnish word with cognates within Finnic languages; its precise historical origin is not fully documented. The term virhetta and related forms are characteristic of Finnish morphology, illustrating the language’s agglutinative case system and the way partitive forms interact with negation and postpositions.

Overall, virhettä serves as a grammatical form used in expressions describing absence of error or in statements about mistakes, while virhe remains the core noun for “error” in most contexts.