How many letters are in the Polish alphabet?

The Polish alphabet has 32 letters: the basic Latin letters minus q, v and x, plus nine letters with diacritics. Q, v and x appear only in foreign loanwords and are not counted as native letters.

Which diacritics does Polish use?

Four kinds: the ogonek (ą, ę), the acute or kreska (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź), the stroke (ł) and the overdot (ż). Each one changes the sound of the base letter.

How do I type Polish letters on a keyboard?

On the Polish programmer's layout you hold AltGr and press the base letter, for example AltGr+a for ą. The exceptions are AltGr+x for ź and AltGr+z for ż, both shown in the table.

What are the Unicode code points?

Each letter has a precomposed Unicode point, such as U+0105 for ą and U+0142 for ł. The table lists both the uppercase and lowercase code points for every diacritic letter.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The reference table and filter run entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

Polish Alphabet Reference

Email me this result

Get this tool's output sent to your inbox, plus one useful tool a week. No spam, unsubscribe any time.

The Polish alphabet has 32 letters: the Latin letters (without native q, v, x) plus nine letters with diacritics. This reference lists every letter with its name, the type of diacritic, the Unicode code points, and the AltGr keyboard shortcut for typing it.

How it works

Polish diacritics come in four kinds, each shown in the table:

ogonek — the little tail under ą and ę that marks a nasal vowel.
kreska / acute — the stroke over ć ń ó ś ź that softens or raises the sound.
stroke — the bar through ł, pronounced like English w.
overdot — the dot over ż.

On the standard Polish programmer’s keyboard layout you produce these by holding AltGr and pressing the base letter, with two memorable exceptions: AltGr+x gives ź and AltGr+z gives ż.

Example and notes

To encode ł you need U+0142 (lowercase) or U+0141 (uppercase). To type ó press AltGr+o. Use the filter box to jump straight to a letter — searching for ogonek shows only ą and ę, while searching for acute lists the five kreska letters. The code points are handy when building regex character classes or validating Polish input.