Ż

Not to be confused with Ẓ.

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

Polish

Signage on Polish municipal police (Straż Miejska) cars uses both the standard letter variant (Ż) and the variant with horizontal stroke (Ƶ)

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⟩. It also sounds closer to Czech Ř.

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

<phonos file="pl-żółty.ogg">żółty</phonos> (yellow)
<phonos file="Pl-żona-2.ogg">żona</phonos> (wife)

Compare ź:
<phonos file="pl-źle.ogg">źle</phonos> (wrongly, badly)
<phonos file="Pl-źrebię.ogg">źrebię</phonos> (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).

Emilian-Romagnol

Ż is used in Emilian-Romagnol to represent the voiced dental fricative [ð] (or, in some peripheral dialects, the affricates [dð~dz]), e.g. viażèr [vjaˈðɛːr] "to travel".

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
Mazovia	161	A1	167	A7
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)