Ż

Ż, ż (Z with overdot) is a letter, consisting of the letter Z of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and an overdot.

Polish

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

Ż represents the voiced retroflex fricative [ʐ], somewhat 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 in Polish from a palatalized ⟨r⟩. Ż represents common Slavic phoneme that originates from a palatalized /ɡ/ or /z/.[1]

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 (z with acute accent):

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.

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

City limit sign of Żurrieq in Malta

In Maltese, ż represents the voiced alveolar sibilant, pronounced like "z" in English "maze".

Tunisian Arabic

It is used in Tunisian Arabic transliteration for /ð/ (based on Maltese with additional letters).

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

References

Corbett, Greville; Comrie, Bernard (2003). The Slavonic Languages. Routledge. p. 690. ISBN 978-1-136-86137-6. The spelling difference reflects the historical difference between a palatalization of /r/ (for rz) and of /g/ or /z/ (for ż).

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[1] Corbett, Greville; Comrie, Bernard (2003). The Slavonic Languages. Routledge. p. 690. ISBN 978-1-136-86137-6. The spelling difference reflects the historical difference between a palatalization of /r/ (for rz) and of /g/ or /z/ (for ż).

Ż