Polish words for every day: days, months, numbers and greetings
Four sets of basic Polish words, each with a page of its own: the seven days, the twelve months, the numbers and the greetings. Every page lists the words with their pronunciation and then explains the grammar that comes with them, because Polish words change their endings in dates, after numbers and after prepositions.
Polish words by topic
Each page opens with a table of the words, their IPA and their short forms, then covers meaning, spelling, grammar and common mistakes, with example sentences.
- 01Days of the week in Polish: names, meaning, IPA and grammarThe days of the week in Polish are poniedziałek, wtorek, środa, czwartek, piątek, sobota and niedziela, Monday to Sunday. Four of them are simply counted from Sunday, none is named after a god or a planet, and all seven are written in lower case.
- 02Months in Polish: the twelve names, meanings, IPA and date formsThe months in Polish are styczeń, luty, marzec, kwiecień, maj, czerwiec, lipiec, sierpień, wrzesień, październik, listopad and grudzień. Only March and May come from Latin; the other ten are Slavic words for the weather, the harvest and the trees, and every one changes its ending inside a date.
- 03Numbers in Polish from zero to miliard: gender, case and ordinalsCounting to ten in Polish goes jeden, dwa, trzy, cztery, pięć, sześć, siedem, osiem, dziewięć, dziesięć. The words are the easy part. Numbers in Polish change with the gender of the noun, and from five upwards they push the noun into the genitive plural: dwa koty, two cats, but pięć kotów, five cats.
- 04Greetings in Polish: dzień dobry, cześć, do widzenia, pan and paniThe standard greetings in Polish are dzień dobry, good day, until the evening and dobry wieczór after it; the formal goodbye is do widzenia. Between friends one word does both jobs: cześć means hi and bye. Which one fits depends less on the clock than on whether the other person is ty or pan and pani.
How Polish words are written
- polskiPolish Latin
- język polskithe Polish language Latin
- dzień dobrygood day Latin
Polish is written in the Latin alphabet with 32 letters, nine of them with diacritics: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż. The letters q, v and x are not used in native Polish words and turn up only in foreign words and names. The Polish alphabet is set out letter by letter, with the name of each letter, on the alphabets page.
Many sounds are spelled with two letters: cz, sz, rz, dz, dź, dż and ch. Rz and ż stand for the same sound, as do ó and u, and h and ch, so spelling has to be learned word by word in those places. Ł is pronounced like English w, so the Polish word for Monday, poniedziałek, ends in a w sound.
Polish has fixed stress on the second-to-last syllable, and the IPA on the four topic pages shows it word after word. Speakers call it język polski or simply polski.
Dates, numbers and greetings: what to expect
Days and months are lower case. The week begins on poniedziałek, and four of the day names are counted from Sunday, as the days of the week in Polish page explains. Ten of the twelve months are named after nature and farm work, from lipiec, the lime tree, to listopad, falling leaves, and in a date they take the genitive: 3 marca, not 3 marzec. The months in Polish page lists every form.
Numbers bring the case system with them. After two, three and four a noun stays in the plural, after five it switches to the genitive plural, and one and two change with the gender of the noun. The numbers in Polish page covers all of it, along with the long scale in which miliard is a thousand million.
Greetings depend on the form of address. Strangers, customers and colleagues are pan and pani and get dzień dobry and do widzenia; friends get cześć. The greetings in Polish page sorts the Polish words for hello, goodbye and thank you by register.
Where Polish is spoken
Polish is the official language of Poland, where the country is called Polska and officially Rzeczpospolita Polska. The country page lists the name of Poland in more than a hundred languages, and the counties of Poland page lists the powiaty voivodeship by voivodeship.
Polish is a West Slavic language, most closely related to Czech and Slovak, and many Polish words have close relatives across the Slavic world. The Balto-Slavic word list sets 243 Polish words beside Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Lithuanian and the other languages of the group: dzień, tydzień, miesiąc and rok, day, week, month and year, are among them.
Questions about Polish words
How many letters does the Polish alphabet have?
32, of which nine carry diacritics: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. Q, v and x appear only in foreign words.
Why do Polish words change their endings?
Polish has seven grammatical cases. A month in a date, a noun after the number five or a day after the preposition w each take a different ending, so the same word appears in several forms.
Which Polish words should a beginner learn first?
Dzień dobry, dziękuję, proszę and do widzenia, then the numbers from jeden to dziesięć. Days and months follow as soon as dates come up.