Z with Accent: Tell ž, ź and ż Apart by Ear, Then Copy One

Is it ž, ź or ż? Which z sound do you mean?

Listen first, then pick the mark. Every z with accent stands for a sound that English spells zh or z, and no two of them are the same sound. The sound column below is the IPA that Wiktionary gives in its entries for ž (opens in a new tab), ź (opens in a new tab) and ż (opens in a new tab). Unicode's names list (opens in a new tab) backs two of them: it calls ʐ the voiced retroflex fricative, and it notes that ʑ is the sound Polish spells with ź. The languages and places come from AccentPad's CLDR and GeoNames facts.

Letter	Mark	Sound	What you hear	Written in, among others	Found in
ž	caron, or háček	/ʒ/	the s of measure	Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Latvian	Žilina, Slovakia
ź	acute	/ʑ/	a soft zh, tongue raised toward the palate	Polish, Silesian, Lower Sorbian	Kędzierzyn-Koźle, Poland
ż in Polish	dot above	/ʐ/	a hard zh, tongue tip drawn back	Polish, Silesian	Żory, Poland
ż in Maltese	dot above	/z/	the z of zoo	Maltese	żiemel, horse

Two rows share one character. Polish ż and Maltese ż are both U+017C, yet they spell different sounds. The letter alone does not tell you the sound; the language does.

The caron row reaches furthest. Unicode's names list annotates ž with Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, Slovenian, and many other languages. It gives ź and ż only Polish and a trailing ellipsis. So ž is the zh letter most of these alphabets share. Polish is the exception, and it orders ź and ż on its own terms; that order is on the Polish alphabet page.

Why does Maltese ż stand for the plain z sound?

Because in Maltese the dot marks the softer sound. Wiktionary's Maltese entry for ż says so. The plain z is the harder one, the ts of cats or the dz of adze. The entry points to ċ and ġ, the other dotted letters, which work the same way. The Akkademja tal-Malti's spelling booklet (opens in a new tab) lists z, named zeta, and ż, named żeta, as two consonants with example words of their own.

Word	Meaning	Said	Its letter
zokk	tree trunk	/t͡sɔk/	z
zunnarija	carrot	/t͡sun.naˈriː.ja/	z
żiemel	horse	/ˈzɪː.mɛl/	ż
żunżan	wasp	/zunˈzaːn/	ż

The words and their sounds come from Wiktionary's entries for zokk (opens in a new tab), zunnarija (opens in a new tab), żiemel (opens in a new tab) and żunżan (opens in a new tab). Read the Said column down. The z words open with ts. The ż words open with the z an English speaker knows.

The dot also travels into the article. The booklet writes iz-zokk, the trunk, and iż-żmien, the time: the article copies the letter that follows, dot and all. And the dotted letter comes first in a list. The CLDR Maltese collation chart (opens in a new tab) puts ċ before c, ġ before g and ż before z. In our test on 2026-10-10, with Node.js v26.0.0 running ICU 78.3 on CLDR 48 data, Maltese rules sorted żunżan before zokk. English rules put it last, after zunnarija.

So stripping the dots from Maltese text changes more than its look. It spells żiemel with the letter Maltese reads as ts.

Where does ž go in an alphabetical list?

That depends on whose alphabet you follow. In Czech, ž is a letter of its own after z. In Estonian, z and ž do not even come last. The Estonian spelling rules from EKI, the Institute of the Estonian Language, open with the alphabet in rule 1 (opens in a new tab): s, š, z, ž, then t. The same rule calls f, š, z and ž foreign-word letters, met only in loanwords.

Croatian adds a twist of its own. Dž is one letter there, written with two characters, and the CLDR Croatian chart (opens in a new tab) sorts it after every other d and before đ. The Estonian (opens in a new tab) and Czech (opens in a new tab) charts encode the orders above. We ran each list through the locale-aware sort in the same Node.js build on 2026-10-10.

Words	Under the language's rules	Under English rules
Tamm, Žukov, Zola	Estonian: Zola, Žukov, Tamm	Tamm, Zola, Žukov
Žižkov, Zlín, Zvolen	Czech: Zlín, Zvolen, Žižkov	Žižkov, Zlín, Zvolen
đak, džep, dug	Croatian: dug, džep, đak	đak, dug, džep

The Croatian words are Wiktionary's dug (opens in a new tab), debt, džep (opens in a new tab), pocket, and đak (opens in a new tab), pupil. English rules read ž as a z with a mark and let the next letter decide, so Žižkov jumps ahead of Zlín. A Czech reader looks for it at the end of the z names. Set the sort language of a contact list or a spreadsheet to match the names in it.

Does a search for z find ž, ź or ż?

Only when the search rules do not belong to a language that writes that letter. We compared a plain z with each letter at the strength that ignores case and accents, in the same Node.js build on 2026-10-10. This is our own measurement, not a quoted rule.

Search rules	z finds ž	z finds ź	z finds ż
Czech	no	yes	yes
Estonian	no	yes	yes
Polish	yes	no	no
Maltese	yes	yes	no
English	yes	yes	yes

Each language protects its own letters and treats the others as a z with decoration. Under Czech rules, a search for Zizkov missed Žižkov. Under Polish rules, Zory missed Żory. Under Maltese rules, ziemel missed żiemel. Under English rules all three matched. Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian rules behaved like Czech in the same test.

The practical rule: a site that serves one language and sorts by its rules will not match a query typed without the mark. If your users type plain z, search with accent-blind English rules, or store a stripped copy of each name next to the real one.

Should you write zh when you cannot type ž?

No. The Finnish and Estonian language authorities both say so, and for the same reason: zh already means something else. Kotus, the Institute for the Languages of Finland, gives the general advice in its guide to sh sounds in loanwords (opens in a new tab). Do not replace š and ž with sh or zh, because some words and names have the letters s and h side by side, read as two sounds, as in Mashadov. Its Finnish examples with ž include džonkki and maharadža.

Case	What the source says
A Finnish loanword with ž	keep ž; do not write zh (Kotus)
Russian ж in a Finnish text	ž under the SFS 4900 standard: Živago (Kotus)
Russian ж in an Estonian text	ž, so Žukov, not Zhukov (Oma Keel)
An Estonian text with no ž available	drop the mark rather than add h: Zizka, not Zhizhka (Oma Keel, 1993 advice)
Passports, certificates, name registers	replacing ž with zh is not acceptable (Oma Keel)

The Kotus rows come from its guide to š and ž in names (opens in a new tab). The Oma Keel rows come from Tuuli Rehemaa, a language planner at EKI, in Oma Keel 1/2016 (opens in a new tab). She quotes advice from the 1990s, when many computers could not type ž. A stand-in with h has a second trap. Once better printing is possible, a script that turns every zh back into ž also changes letter pairs that were never ž.

On Windows the stand-in is not needed for ž at all. Alt+0158 types it and Alt+0142 types Ž; Kotus prints the same codes (opens in a new tab). The cp1252 mapping file (opens in a new tab) shows why: Windows-1252 holds ž at byte 9E and Ž at 8E. It holds no ź or ż, which is why the Polish pair needs the Symbols panel instead.

Which characters look like a z with accent but are something else?

Several, and a search treats each one as a different character. The names and notes in this table are Unicode's own, from the names list. The last column is what the usual accent strip does: split the letter as UAX #15 (opens in a new tab) defines, then drop the marks. We ran it in the same Node.js build.

Character	Unicode name	Unicode's note	After the strip
ƶ, U+01B6	z with stroke	barred z; Pan-Turkic Latin orthography; also a handwritten z	ƶ, unchanged
ǯ, U+01EF	ezh with caron	Skolt Sami; its base is ezh, ʒ, not z	ʒ
ʐ, U+0290	z with retroflex hook	the IPA symbol for the Polish ż sound	ʐ, unchanged
ʑ, U+0291	z with curl	the IPA symbol for the sound of Polish ź	ʑ, unchanged
ẓ, U+1E93	z with dot below	Semitic transliteration	z
dž, U+01C6	dz with caron	one character for the digraph dž	dž; NFKC splits it into d and ž

The barred z causes the most confusion. Wiktionary lists ƶ as an alternative form of Polish ż, and Unicode notes it as a handwritten z. In typed text it is another character. Under English rules, the ones that ignore accents, our test found that Ƶory does not match Żory. Type ż, not ƶ, unless you are writing Pan-Turkic Latin.

The IPA letters are not marks on a z either. ʐ and ʑ are the symbols the sound table above uses, so they belong in a pronunciation guide, never in a name.