Need an ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź or ż but have no Polish keyboard? Type them straight from your own - hold Alt and press the matching letter - or tap the buttons below, then copy your text anywhere.
How to Type Polish Accents & Special Characters
This tool lets you write Polish without a Polish keyboard, and the best part is that you do not even need the mouse: every accent can be typed straight from your own physical keyboard. You never have to hunt for a key, because each accented letter sits on the very letter it is built from - hold Alt, press the plain key, and the accent appears. Prefer to point and click? Every character is also a button on the bar, and it drops straight into the text at the cursor. When you are done, hit Copy All and paste the text wherever you need it.
Keyboard shortcuts. The nine Polish letters each sit on the Latin letter they grow from, so you simply hold Alt and press it - no guessing. Alt+A gives the nasal ą, Alt+E the nasal ę, Alt+C gives ć, Alt+L the barred ł, Alt+N gives ń, Alt+O the accented ó and Alt+S gives ś. The Z key holds both dotted and accented forms: Alt+Z is ź and Alt+ZZ is ż. Add Shift for the capital.
A note on Polish letters. Several of these are full letters of the alphabet, not accented spellings. The tails on ą and ę, called ogonek ("little tail"), mark nasal vowels, while the stroke through ł turns it into a sound close to the English w, so Łódź begins like "wood". The accent on ó is a spelling clue, not a stress mark: it sounds just like u, which is why the two are easy to confuse and why Polish children drill which words take which. Each has its own place in the alphabet and its own slot in the dictionary.
Click Shift on the left of the bar to lock the letters to upper case, and click it again to go back; holding your physical Shift while you click works too. Four more keys sit in our usual on-screen-keyboard style, each with its icon and label: Undo and Redo step back and forth through your edits, Clear empties the box, and Copy All puts the whole text on your clipboard. Your draft is kept in this browser, so it is still there when you come back, and nothing you type is ever sent anywhere - there is no sign-up and nothing to install.
Everything happens in your browser, it works the same on a phone or tablet, and switching the accent set to another language is one tap on the buttons under the box. To type whole words on a full layout instead, open our Polish keyboard, or practise your speed with the Polish typing test.
Want this keyboard on your own website? You can embed it with a single line of HTML.
Frequently Asked Questions
You have two ways. The quickest is your own keyboard: hold Alt and press the matching letter, so Alt+A types á and Alt+N types ñ, without leaving the keys. Or click the accented letter on the button bar - it is inserted at the cursor, right where you are typing. Either way there is nothing to set up: you keep your usual keyboard layout and only reach for the few characters it cannot produce. When the text is ready, press Copy All and paste it wherever you need it.
Hold Alt and press the letter the accent is built on - Alt+A for á, Alt+N for ñ - so you never have to hunt for a key. When a language puts several accents on the same letter, keep Alt held and tap the key again to cycle through them: in French Alt+A gives à, Alt+AA gives â and Alt+AAA gives æ. Add Shift for the capital. Every button also shows its shortcut in the corner, and the shortcuts change with the language you pick under the box.
You do not need a Polish keyboard at all. Every Polish accent sits on the English letter it is built from, so you hold Alt and press that letter, and the on-screen buttons show each shortcut in their corner. Prefer the mouse? Click any character on the bar and it drops in at the cursor. When the text is ready, press Copy All and paste it wherever you need - your usual keyboard layout never changes.
They share the Z key but are different letters. The dotted ż (Alt+ZZ) is a buzzing sound like the s in "measure"; the accented ź (Alt+Z) is a softer, higher zh. Both are full letters of the Polish alphabet with their own dictionary entries, alongside the barred ł (Alt+L) and the nasal ą and ę.
Undo and Redo step backwards and forwards through your edits, Clear empties the text box, and Copy All copies everything in the box to your clipboard so you can paste it elsewhere. On our full on-screen keyboard these actions hide behind Ctrl (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y and so on); on this page each one is a plain button with an icon and a label, so no shortcut is needed.
Yes to both. The bar works with a tap, so it is handy on a phone or tablet where switching the system keyboard to another language is fiddly. And everything runs in your browser: what you type is never sent to a server, there are no accounts and nothing to install. Your current text is saved only in this browser so it is waiting for you next time, and Clear removes it.
Spanish loads by default, and the buttons under the box switch the accent set to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Azerbaijani and the Nordic languages - each with its own letters such as ç, ä, ô, ł or ə. There are also three transliteration pages that turn Latin typing into another script by sound: Russian (Cyrillic), Greek and Arabic. Each language has its own page, so the text and shortcuts are tailored to it. If instead you want a full keyboard to type whole words, every language also has one on our online keyboard, and you can practise on real phrases with the typing test.