voita

Voita is a Finnish word that appears in two common, unrelated grammatical forms. In everyday cooking, voita is the partitive singular of the noun voi, which means butter. It is widely used in recipes and cooking instructions because the partitive signals an indefinite amount of a mass noun. For example, “Lisää voita” means “Add butter,” and “paista voita ja sipulia” translates to “fry with butter and onions.”

Voita also functions as the second-person singular imperative form of the verb voittaa, meaning “to win.” In this sense, voita is a command or exhortation, used in contexts such as sports, games, or motivational speech: “Voita kilpailu!” would be translated as “Win the competition!”

In written Finnish, the meaning of voita is determined by context and capitalization. When used as a noun form related to butter, it appears in lowercase (voita). When serving as an imperative verb, it is also lowercase, unless it starts a sentence. Voita does not constitute a separate lexical item beyond these two common forms, though it can appear in fixed expressions or quotations where its meaning is clear from surrounding text.

See also: voi (butter); voittaa (to win).