Every Polish letter ready to copy with one click — the nine diacritic letters in upper and lower case, followed by the complete 32-letter alphabet in order. Ideal when your keyboard has no ą, ł, or ż.
The nine letters with Polish diacritics in both cases — the ogonek (ą, ę), the kreska accent (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź), the stroke (ł), and the overdot (ż).
The complete Polish alphabet in dictionary order, lower case. Q, V, and X are not part of the alphabet — they appear only in foreign words and names.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
Polish uses a 32-letter Latin alphabet extended by nine letters built with four diacritics. The ogonek ('little tail') under ą and ę marks the nasal vowels; the kreska — an acute accent — over ć, ń, ś, and ź marks soft consonants; the overdot (kropka) on ż marks a hard 'zh' sound; and the stroke through ł marks a sound that today is pronounced like an English 'w.' Ó with kreska sounds exactly like u — the distinction is purely historical spelling. Meanwhile q, v, and x are officially outside the alphabet, showing up only in loanwords, brand names, and foreign proper nouns.
All nine special letters are precomposed characters in Unicode's Latin Extended-A block (U+0100–U+017F): ą is U+0105, ł is U+0142, ż is U+017C, and so on. That means each one copies and pastes as a single self-contained glyph — no combining accents to break — and renders correctly across browsers, documents, and every major social platform. It also means ą and a are different characters to a computer: searches, usernames, and passwords treat them as unrelated letters, and sorting puts ą immediately after a in Polish dictionary order rather than at the end of the alphabet.
Polish is the second most spoken Slavic language after Russian, with about 40 million users, and its spelling hides some famous traps. The pairs ó/u and ż/rz are pronounced identically — którym and żaba could just as easily be spelled with u and rz to the ear — so choosing correctly is a staple of school dictation. Dropping diacritics entirely, as people typing on foreign keyboards often do, can flip meanings: zadanie is a task, żądanie is a demand; paczka is a package, pączka refers to the famous doughnut. The digraphs cz, sz, rz, ch, dz, dź, and dż are letter combinations, not extra alphabet entries.
Yes. The nine special letters are standard precomposed Unicode characters from the Latin Extended-A block, supported by effectively every modern font. They display correctly in bios, captions, comments, messages, and most usernames on Instagram, TikTok, Discord, X, and WhatsApp. Only strictly ASCII-limited fields, like some email addresses, will refuse them.
Poles typing on foreign keyboards do it constantly, and readers usually understand from context. But the marks carry real meaning: los is fate while łoś is a moose, and paczka (package) differs from pączka (of a doughnut). For anything public or formal — names, documents, printed text — use the proper letters; this page exists to make that easy.
They are separate letters with different sounds. Ż with the overdot is the hard 'zh' of żaba (frog), identical in sound to the digraph rz. Ź with the kreska is its soft counterpart, as in źle (badly) — a lighter, palatalized sound. Alphabetically both come after z, with ź before ż at the very end of the Polish alphabet.
Today ó and u are pronounced identically — pure 'u.' Centuries ago ó was a long 'o' that gradually shifted in sound while the spelling stayed put, preserving the word's history: góra kept its ó because related words like górski show the o family. Choosing between them is a classic Polish spelling difficulty, which is why dictation tests love it.
Use the free online Polish keyboard linked below — it uses the standard 'programmers' layout, where you hold AltGr plus a base letter to get its Polish form (AltGr+A for ą, AltGr+L for ł). If you want to set up your own system shortcuts instead, our Polish characters page lists the Windows Alt codes for all eighteen letters.