Polish alphabet

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Polish alphabet, with historical letters in gray

The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language. It is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as the kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź), the dot above (ż), the ogonek (ą, ę), and the stroke (ł). The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is Windows-1250.

[edit] Description

There are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet, including 9 vowels and 23 consonants.

**Polish alphabet**
Uppercase	A	Ą	B	C	Ć	D	E	Ę	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	Ł	M	N	Ń	O	Ó	P	R	S	Ś	T	U	W	Y	Z	Ź	Ż
Lowercase	a	ą	b	c	ć	d	e	ę	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	ł	m	n	ń	o	ó	p	r	s	ś	t	u	w	y	z	ź	ż

There are also 7 digraphs (ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz).

The letters q, v and x do not belong to the Polish alphabet, but are used in some foreign words and commercial names. In loanwords they are often replaced by kw, w and ks, respectively (as in kwarc "quartz", weranda "veranda", ksenofobia "xenophobia").

Some letters of the Polish alphabet not present in the English alphabet can be shown using the following HTML codes:

**Letters with diacritics**
Upper case	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
HTML entity	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
Result	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
Lower case	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó	ś	ź	ż
HTML entity	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó ó	ś	ź	ż
Result	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó ó	ś	ź	ż