wieków

Wieków is the genitive plural form of the Polish noun wiek, which means age, lifetime, or era. The singular form wiek has nominative plural wieki and genitive plural wieków. Wieków is used in contexts that require the genitive plural, such as after prepositions that govern the genitive or with numerals in phrases describing quantity or duration.

Common phrases in which wieków appears include w ciągu wieków, meaning “over the centuries,” and z wieków dawnych, meaning “from ancient ages.” These expressions place events or periods within a broad temporal span and rely on the genitive plural to convey duration or scope. In contrast, the expression w wieku… uses the genitive singular wieku to indicate age, as in w wieku pięćdziesięciu lat (“at the age of fifty”).

Etymology traces wiek to the Proto-Slavic root věkъ, tied to the concept of a span of time. The form wieków is strictly a grammatical inflection and is not a separate lexical word with its own meaning beyond the notion of “ages” or “eras” in its inflected use.

In modern Polish, wieków commonly appears in historical and literary writing, where precise temporal framing is important. It contrasts with wieki (nominative plural) and wieku (genitive singular), which serve different grammatical functions.