Ó ó
«ó» is a vowel of the Polish script, read as “oo — same sound as u”. The same oo as u. The stroke is a memory of an earlier o: góra is said "GOO-rah". For example, in the word “góra” — mountain. The Polish alphabet has 32 letters in total. The only letter of the alphabet whose sound coincides fully with another letter (u). Only the history of a word tells them apart, and Poles themselves keep mixing up the spelling. It appears, for example, in the word “dobry wieczór” — good evening.
In short
| Character | Ó ó |
| Sound | oo — same sound as u |
| What it is | a vowel |
In our course the character comes 21st of 32, its neighbours in the course are o and p, appears in 273 words of this site.
How to type Ó ó
- On a phone: press and hold o on the keyboard, and ó appears among the variants. If it does not, add the Polish keyboard in the keyboard settings.
- In Word on Windows: type U+00F3 and press Alt+X right after it — the code turns into the character.
- On a Mac: switch to the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 00F3.
- Unicode code points: ó — U+00F3, Ó — U+00D3. With them, the characters can be found in the character map of any system.
How it sounds
The same oo as u. The stroke is a memory of an earlier o: góra is said "GOO-rah"
The character in a word
A lone character is hard to remember: memory holds on to meaning, and a letter has none. The word it stands in provides that anchor.
- góramountain
The character in the “polish tails and strokes” group
Nine signs: two nasals (ą, ę), three soft ones (ć, ś, ź — with ń), ó, ł, and their dots and tails. A tail marks a nasal sound, a stroke marks softness, a dot is history.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound (for «ó» it is “oo — same sound as u”, as in the word “góra”), see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 32 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Polish character ó read?
As “oo — same sound as u” — it is a vowel of the Polish script. The same oo as u. The stroke is a memory of an earlier o: góra is said "GOO-rah". For example, in the word “góra” — mountain.