The English term, "accusative", derives from the Latin accusativus, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek αἰτιατική.
The word can also mean "causative", and that might have derived from the Greeks,[2] but the sense of the Roman translation has endured and is used in some other modern languages as the grammatical term for this case, for example in Russian (винительный).
Modern English almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns; pronouns, however, have an understood case usage, as in them, her, him and whom, which merges the accusative and dative functions, and originates in old Germanic dative forms (see Declension in English).
If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German – Der Mann sieht den Hund (The man sees the dog).
In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in the accusative case.
The masculine forms for German articles, e.g., "the", "a/an", "my", etc., change in the accusative case: they always end in -en.
In German, the accusative case is also used for some adverbial expressions, mostly temporal ones, as in Diesen Abend bleibe ich daheim (This evening I'm staying at home), where diesen Abend is marked as accusative, although not a direct object.
In Russian, accusative is used not only to display the direct object of an action, but also to indicate the destination or goal of motion.
The prepositions в and на can both take accusative in situations where they are indicating the goal of a motion.
The PIE accusative case has nearly eroded in Russian, merging with the genitive or the nominative in most declensions.
Only singular first-declension nouns (ending in 'а', 'я', or 'ия') have a distinct accusative ('у', 'ю', or 'ию').
For the Hungarian 1st and 2nd person singular accusative forms, the pronoun can often be dropped if it is clear from the context who the speaker is referring to.
It is preserved today in many Semitic languages as Modern Standard Arabic, Hebrew and Ge'ez.