Polish Alphabet (ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż): Every Letter in Order

Why does a Polish list put Łódź after Lublin?

Because in the Polish alphabet, ł is not an l with a mark on it. It is the next letter. The same holds for ą after a, ć after c, ę after e, ń after n, ó after o and ś after s. At the end come z, ź and ż, in that order. The EU Publications Office list (opens in a new tab) of the letters of each official language gives the Polish alphabet letters in this order. The CLDR Polish collation chart (opens in a new tab) encodes it for software.

English sorting rules do the opposite. They read Ł as an L with something extra. So Łódź lands among the other l words, and the rest of the word decides. We measured the difference on 2026-10-10 with the locale-aware compare in Node.js v26.0.0, which runs ICU 78.3 on CLDR 48 data.

Two names	Under Polish rules	Under English rules
Lublin, Łódź	Lublin first	Łódź first
Czajka, Ćwiek	Czajka first	Ćwiek first
Szczecin, Śląsk	Szczecin first	Śląsk first
Żory, Źródło	Źródło first	Żory first
Opole, Ósemka	Opole first	Opole first

The last row is the control: both rule sets put Opole first, Polish because o comes before ó, English because p comes before s. Search behaves the same way. In the same test we compared at the strength that ignores case and accents. A search for Lodz found Łódź under English rules and missed it under Polish ones. Under Polish rules the stroke makes ł a different letter, not a decoration.

So a contact list, a spreadsheet or a database set to Polish sorts names by the Polish alphabet. That is the order a Polish reader expects. Set to English, it scatters Śląsk among the s words and lets Łódź jump ahead of Lublin.

Which letters does the Polish alphabet leave out or keep rare?

Q, v and x are missing from the Polish alphabet, and ą, ę and ń never start a word. The page Abecadło z pieca spadło (opens in a new tab) on the Polish government's powroty.gov.pl covers each case below. The index row comes from this page's CLDR facts.

Letters	Their place in Polish
q, v, x	outside the basic letters; met in some foreign words and in historical spelling
ą, ę, ń	full letters of the alphabet, but no Polish word starts with one
Y, the capital	used only in exceptions, such as loanwords and historical spelling
cz, ch, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz	digraphs: two letters for one sound, not counted as letters
Ą, Ę, Ń in CLDR's index	missing; the index does list Ł, Ś, Ż and also Q, V, X

The index row explains a detail you can see in any Polish dictionary. CLDR's index set is the list of headings that software uses to split an alphabetical list into sections. Its alphabetic information chart (opens in a new tab) shows that Polish gets a section for Ł but none for Ą, since no word would go in it. Q, V and X do get sections, because words of foreign origin still need a place.

Digraphs stay two letters when you sort. Szkoła goes under s, among the other words that start with s, and CLDR's index has no heading for sz.

How do you say ł and the other Polish letter names?

Say it like the w in water. Wiktionary's entry for ł (opens in a new tab) calls the letter eł, said /ˈɛw/. Its entry for Łódź (opens in a new tab) gives the city as /ˈwut͡ɕ/, with a w sound where the ł is. Unicode names it LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE: the line through it is a stroke, not an accent. Why it sounds like w, and which other alphabets write it, is on the Polish L page.

The other letters carry an ogonek, a kreska or a dot. Each name below is the one Wiktionary gives in its entries for ą (opens in a new tab), ó (opens in a new tab), ś (opens in a new tab) and ż (opens in a new tab). The mark column uses Unicode's own names.

Letter	Polish name	The name said	Mark
ą	ą, or a z ogonkiem	/ɔw̃/	ogonek, a small tail
ł	eł	/ˈɛw/	stroke
ó	ó, o z kreską, or u kreskowane	/ˈu/	acute, the kreska
ś	eś	/ˈɛɕ/	acute
ż	żet	/ˈʐɛt/	dot above

The ó row is the one learners trip on. Ó is said /u/, the same sound as the plain u, so Łódź has no o sound at all: a w, then u, then /t͡ɕ/. Ą is a nasal vowel, the /ɔw̃/ of its own name.

Which Polish letters sound alike but spell differently?

Ó and u sound the same. So do rz and ż, and h and ch. Each pair below is two Polish words that Wiktionary transcribes identically. The spelling is the only difference.

Word	Meaning	Word	Meaning	Both said
Łódź	the city	łudź	delude!	/ˈwut͡ɕ/
morze	sea	może	maybe	/ˈmɔ.ʐɛ/
hart	fortitude	chart	greyhound	/xart/

The pairs come from Wiktionary's entries for łudź (opens in a new tab), morze (opens in a new tab), może (opens in a new tab), hart (opens in a new tab) and chart (opens in a new tab). Łódź lists łudź as its homophone.

This matters when you type Polish by ear. A spell checker cannot flag the slip, since both spellings are real words. Morze and może differ by one letter and mean different things. The same goes for the other pairs.

It also matters for search. Under Polish rules, ó and u are different letters. So are ż and z. In our 2026-10-10 test, a Polish-rules search for moze did not find może; an English-rules search did. Type the letter with its mark, or copy it from the grid at the top. For longer text, the Polish keyboard types every letter and shows which key holds it on Windows and on a Mac.

Why does removing accents turn Łódź into Łodz?

Because ł has no accent to remove. Most scripts that strip accents work in two steps. First they split each letter into a base letter and combining marks, the decomposition defined in UAX #15 (opens in a new tab). Then they drop the marks. Ó splits into o and U+0301, ą into a and U+0328, ż into z and U+0307. Ł does not split. The Latin Extended-A chart (opens in a new tab) lists it as U+0142 with no decomposition, a letter of its own.

We ran the usual strip on 2026-10-10 in the same Node.js build. Łódź came out as Łodz, with the ł intact. A tool that needs plain ASCII must map ł to l and Ł to L as separate steps. A Polish reader may still prefer the original: under the Polish rules above, Lodz and Łódź are different words.

For a URL slug or a file name, keep the Polish letters when the system allows UTF-8. Our o with accent page covers ó in the other languages that write it. If you must strip, map every letter of the Polish alphabet that carries a mark. Then test the result on Łódź. Only its ł needs a rule of its own.