Numbers in Polish from zero to miliard: gender, case and ordinals

How the numbers in Polish are built

The teens add -naście to the unit: jedenaście, dwanaście, trzynaście. The spelling shifts a little along the way, so four becomes czter- in czternaście, five becomes pięt- in piętnaście, and six loses its final consonants in szesnaście. Twenty, thirty and forty are dwadzieścia, trzydzieści and czterdzieści, and from fifty the ending is -dziesiąt: pięćdziesiąt, sześćdziesiąt, dziewięćdziesiąt.

The hundreds follow the same split. One hundred is sto and two hundred dwieście; three and four hundred take -sta (trzysta, czterysta), five to nine hundred take -set (pięćset, dziewięćset). The CLDR rules for Polish, which software uses to spell out numbers, encode exactly this division.

Larger numbers are written as separate words with no and in between. Wikipedia's article on Polish numerals spells 91,234 as dziewięćdziesiąt jeden tysięcy dwieście trzydzieści cztery. Twenty-one is dwadzieścia jeden, and the year 2026 is dwa tysiące dwadzieścia sześć.

One and two: jeden, jedna, jedno and dwa, dwie, dwaj

Jeden behaves like an ordinary adjective. It is jeden kot, one cat, with a masculine noun, jedna książka, one book, with a feminine one, and jedno okno, one window, with a neuter one. The noun stays in the singular.

Two has more forms. With masculine and neuter nouns it is dwa: dwa koty, dwa okna. With feminine nouns it becomes dwie: dwie książki. For groups of men, the masculine personal gender, there is dwaj, and three and four have trzej and czterej in the same role; the genitive form dwóch also appears with them, as in Wikipedia's example dwóch mężczyzn, two men.

Polish also has collective numerals for mixed groups, children and young animals. Dwoje dzieci means two children, troje, czworo and pięcioro continue the series. Wikipedia lists where they belong: with personal and animate neuter nouns, with nouns that exist only in the plural, and with groups of men and women together, a category English numbers do not mark at all.

Two cats, five cats: the case after numbers in Polish

This is the rule that makes numbers in Polish feel hard. With dwa, trzy and cztery the noun stays in the nominative plural, and the verb agrees in the plural: dwa koty stały, two cats stood. From five upwards the noun switches to the genitive plural and the whole phrase is treated as neuter singular. Wikipedia's example is 5 kotów stało, five cats stood, where both kotów and the verb form stało show the change.

Compounds follow their last word. Twenty-two, twenty-three and twenty-four behave like two, three and four: dwadzieścia dwa koty. The teens are the exception, because twelve, thirteen and fourteen end in -naście and take the genitive like five: dwanaście kotów. Groups of men always take the genitive, whatever the number: pięciu mężczyzn, five men, uses the special masculine personal form pięciu.

Thousands obey the same pattern because tysiąc is grammatically a noun. One thousand is tysiąc, two to four thousand take the plural tysiące (dwa tysiące, cztery tysiące), and five thousand upwards take the genitive plural tysięcy (pięć tysięcy). The same three-way split gives milion, miliony, milionów and miliard, miliardy, miliardów in the CLDR rules.

Milion, miliard and the long scale

Polish uses the long scale, as Wikipedia's article on the numerals notes. A milion is a million, a thousand millions is a miliard, and the Polish word bilion means a million millions, the English trillion. An English billion in a news report from the United States therefore becomes miliard in Polish, and translating it as bilion multiplies the figure by a thousand.

For the ordinals, the forms in the table above are masculine; the feminine and neuter take -a and -e, so the first time is pierwszy raz but the first lesson is pierwsza lekcja. Ordinals also take cases like any adjective: na trzecim piętrze in the example table is trzeci, third, in the locative after na, on.