Ż

Ż, ż is a letter in the Polish, Kashubian and Maltese alphabets.

Polish

An aircraft belonging to Polish Border Guard (Straż Graniczna), using standard letter variant.

Polish municipal police (Straż Miejska) badge, using variant with horizontal stroke.

Ż represents the voiced retroflex fricative [ʐ], similar to the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "mirage". It usually corresponds to Ж or Ž in most other Slavic languages.

Its pronunciation is the same as the rz (digraph), the only difference being that ⟨rz⟩ evolved from a palatalized ⟨r⟩.

Ż occasionally devoices to the voiceless retroflex fricative [ʂ], particularly in final position.

Ż should not be confused with ⟨Ź⟩ (or ⟨z⟩ followed by ⟨i⟩), termed "soft zh", the voiced alveolopalatal fricative ([ʑ]).

Examples of Ż

 żółty (yellow)
 żona (wife)

Compare ź:
 źle (wrongly, badly)
 źrebię (foal)

Occasionally, capital Ƶ (Z with horizontal stroke) is used instead of capital Ż for aesthetic purposes, especially in all-caps text and handwriting. It is common to see capital Ƶ with dot above, used to easily distinguish it from capital Z or Ź (Z with acute accent).

Kashubian

Kashubian ż is a voiced fricative like in Polish, but it is postalveolar ([ʒ]) rather than retroflex.

Maltese

In Maltese ż is pronounced like "z" in English "maze".

Computing codes

character	Ż		ż
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH DOT ABOVE		LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH DOT ABOVE
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	379	017B	380	017C
UTF-8	197 187	C5 BB	197 188	C5 BC
Numeric character reference	Ż	Ż	ż	ż
CP 852	189	BD	190	BE
CP 775	163	A3	164	A4
Windows-1250, ISO-8859-2	175	AF	191	BF
Windows-1257, ISO-8859-13	221	DD	253	FD
Mac Central European	251	FB	253	FD

See also

• Polish alphabet
• Polish phonology
• Dot (diacritic)

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter Z with diacritics
Źź	Ẑẑ	Žž	Żż	Ẓẓ	Ẕẕ	Ƶƶ	Ȥȥ	Ⱬⱬ	ᵶ	ᶎ	ʐ	ʑ	ɀ
Letters using dot above sign ( ◌̇ )
Ȧȧ	Ḃḃ	Ċċ	Ḋḋ	Ėė	Ḟḟ	Ġġ	Ḣḣ	İ ı	Ṁṁ	Ṅṅ	Ȯȯ	Ṗṗ	Ṙṙ	Ṡṡẛ	Ṫṫ	Ẇẇ	Ẋẋ	Ẏẏ	Żż
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646