The Polish Words Hiding in English: A New Digital Dictionary Opens Poland's Linguistic Past

October 4, 2026 · 7 min read

A dictionary almost a century old has been given a new life. The monumental Słownik Warszawski — the Warsaw Dictionary — is being transformed from thousands of printed pages into a structured, searchable record of Polish. It is a gift to historians and linguists, but also an irresistible invitation to ordinary word lovers: open the archive and you quickly discover how restless, inventive and gloriously odd a language can be.

A dictionary too large to leave on the shelf

Compiled under Jan Karłowicz, Adam Antoni Kryński and Władysław Niedźwiedzki, the dictionary appeared in eight volumes between 1900 and 1927. Its nearly 7,700 pages contain about 265,000 headwords, making it the largest Polish dictionary by physical extent. Alongside standard vocabulary, it records dialect, specialist language, borrowings, historical forms and one-off inventions.

Dr Mirosław Koziarski began converting part of the work for his doctorate and continued independently afterwards. When the new edition was announced in September 2026, about 86,000 entries — roughly a quarter of the dictionary — were already available. This is more than a collection of page scans: entries are being corrected, structured and tied back to their source pages so that people can search, compare and analyse them.

You can explore the growing archive at the digital Słownik Warszawski, or read the September 2026 report from Science in Poland.

The delightful words waiting inside

The archive's curiosities show why historical dictionaries matter. Mabdziurnydescribed something tiny. A kidoń was a person who spilled food on their clothes. A weredyk told everybody the truth to their face. These are not necessarily words to force back into daily conversation. They are small records of what earlier speakers noticed, teased one another about and considered worth naming.

Digitisation makes those records usable in a new way. Instead of knowing which heavy volume to open, a reader can follow spellings, labels and related forms across the collection. It turns a reference work into a map of language change — the same sort of change explored in our guide to fascinating word origins and etymology.

12 English words inspired by Polish

English has borrowed fewer words from Polish than from French, Latin or German, but the contribution is more varied than it first appears. A 2021 scholarly review identified 33 direct Polish borrowings in English across eight subject areas. The list below favours words you may actually meet, while noting when the route into English is indirect or debated.

1. Pierogi — filled dumplings, from Polish pierogi, the plural of pieróg. English sometimes adds another plural ending and writes “pierogies”, although the Polish form is already plural.
2. Kielbasa — sausage, from Polish kiełbasa. English drops the stroked ł and usually uses the word for Polish-style smoked sausage rather than sausage in general.
3. Babka — a rich, sweet yeast cake. Polish babka is a diminutive of baba, “old woman” or “grandmother”, perhaps inspired by the cake's traditional shape.
4. Bigos — the slow-cooked cabbage-and-meat dish often called hunter's stew in English. The dish is unmistakably Polish, though the deeper origin of its name is uncertain.
5. Pączki — filled Polish doughnuts, especially familiar in parts of North America before Lent. The singular is pączek; English speakers often use the Polish plural, with or without the accent mark.
6. Kabanos — a long, thin, dried sausage. English borrowed the name of this Polish speciality with almost no alteration.
7. Mazurka — a lively dance in triple time, and the music written for it. Its name is connected with Mazovia in central Poland and became internationally famous through composers including Frédéric Chopin.
8. Polonaise — another Polish dance, but a linguistic traveller. English adopted the French word meaning “Polish”; the Polish name is polonez.
9. Zloty — Poland's currency, from Polish złoty, literally “golden”. English again replaces ł with an ordinary l when the original character is unavailable.
10. Uhlan — a lancer in a Polish or other European cavalry regiment. It reached English through German from Polish ułan, whose own history leads farther east.
11. Hetman — a historic title for a senior military commander in Poland, Lithuania and Cossack lands. English took the regional title, while Polish had earlier adapted a Germanic military term.
12. Intelligentsia — the educated intellectual class. English received the form chiefly through Russian, but Polish inteligencja was central to the word's modern social meaning. It is best described as Polish-influenced rather than a simple, direct loan.

That mixture matters. Words rarely march straight across a border carrying a stamped passport. They move with food, music, migration, armies, trade and politics; sometimes Polish is the source, sometimes the bridge, and sometimes one important stop in a much longer journey. Culture.pl's exploration of disputed Polish word histories is a useful warning against tidying those journeys too aggressively.

What English and Polish reveal about one another

The most visible Polish loans in English cluster around things carried easily between communities: recipes, dances, money and military titles. That is not evidence of a small culture. It is evidence of the situations in which English speakers most often met Polish speakers — at tables, in concert halls, across borders and in migrant neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, the Warsaw Dictionary records Polish doing exactly what English does: adopting, adapting, combining and occasionally inventing. No language is a sealed container. Dictionaries become fascinating when we stop treating them as rulebooks and start reading them as records of human contact.

From archive to word game

A newly searchable dictionary makes obscure vocabulary easier to discover, but discovery is only the beginning. Try retrieving a word from its definition in today's Dictionary Game, explore an unusual entry in our Word of the Day, or invent a convincing definition in Fictionary. The best words deserve to be played with as well as preserved.