The Accusative Case

Direct objects of transitive verbs are usually in the accusative case. Thus in an Old English version of a sentence like "We ate fish for dinner," "fish" would be accusative. Objects of certain prepositions are sometimes or always accusative, and the accusative can be used adverbially in certain expressions of time.

In Old English the accusative had partly fallen together with the nominative. For example, nominative and accusative are never distinguished in the plural or in any neuter noun, pronoun or adjective, and they have also fallen together in the singular of strong masculine nouns. Modern English retains no accusative forms: the "objective" forms of pronouns (e.g. him, her, them, whom) are derived from the Old English dative.