võimade

Võimade is an Estonian word form derived from the noun võim, which means "power" or "authority." It appears as an inflected plural form used in contexts that express relationships, possession or reference to multiple sources of power, often rendered in English as "of the powers" or "of the authorities."

In everyday and formal Estonian, võimade occurs in phrases discussing distribution, contestation or misuse of power, for example in legal, political and sociological discourse. Common collocations include notions of inter-institutional balance, checks and balances, and phrases about the abuse or limitation of authority. Because Estonian is an agglutinative language with a rich case system, võimade can function within larger syntactic constructions to mark grammatical relations pertinent to plural entities associated with power.

Etymologically, võim is a Finnic word related to Finnish voima, reflecting a shared Uralic heritage for terms denoting strength or capability. As a morphological variant, võimade illustrates how Estonian marks number and case on nouns to convey precise meanings in context. The term is used across media, academic writing and everyday speech when discussing authorities, capacities, institutions or abstract conceptions of power.