Numbers in Polish: 1–100 Full Table (With Audio)

Polish › Vocabulary › Numbers

Updated August 2026 · Everyday Polish · 7-minute read · 🔊 every number has native audio · ✓ Reviewed by Laura, native Polish speaker

Polish numbers 0 to 20

The tens, the hundreds, and a thousand

How to build any number up to a hundred

This is the easy part, and it’s the reason you don’t need a chart of every number from one to a hundred taped to the fridge.

Polish builds numbers exactly the way English does: the tens first, then the ones, no joining word, no reversing, no surprises. Twenty-one is twenty one. Forty-seven is forty seven.

• 21 — dwadzieścia jeden (dvah-JESH-chah YEH-den)
• 47 — czterdzieści siedem (chter-JESH-chee SHEH-dem)
• 99 — dziewięćdziesiąt dziewięć (jeh-vyen-JEH-shont JEH-vyench)

That’s the whole system. If you can say the twenty numbers in the first table and the seven tens in the second, you can already say every number below a hundred. Learners who come to Polish from German find this a considerable relief.

The one rule that catches everyone: two, three, four… and then five

Here is the thing that makes Polish numbers feel harder than they are, and you can get the useful ninety percent of it in a minute.

In English, the noun after a number never changes: two years, five years, a hundred years. In Polish it changes once. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 take one shape of the noun; 5 and up take another.

You do not need to study this. Point at what you want, say the number, and a Polish shopkeeper will hand it to you without blinking. But if you learn a handful of whole phrases the way we teach them — dwie kawy poproszę, two coffees please — the right ending arrives inside the phrase and you never have to think about it. That’s the approach behind the whole basic Polish phrases page.

Dwa or dwie? The only number with a wardrobe

You may have noticed dwa lata but dwie kawy. Polish has two words for “two,” and which one you use depends on the thing being counted. Dwie (dvyeh) goes with feminine words — dwie kawy, dwie siostry, two sisters. Dwa (dvah) goes with everything else.

Two is the one you’ll notice, because it turns up constantly; the rest you can leave alone for now. And if you use the wrong one, you will be perfectly understood — this is a politeness of the language, not a barrier to it.

First, second, third: the ordinals

You need these more than you’d expect: floors of a building, dates, and the numbered order of anything.

The numbers in your family’s records

If you have ever ordered a copy of a Polish birth or marriage record for a grandparent, you already know the shock: often there are no boxes at all. Across much of nineteenth-century Poland a parish or civil entry is one long handwritten paragraph, and every number in it — the date, the hour, the ages of everyone in the room — is written out in words. (Not every record looks like this. Registers from the Austrian and Prussian parts are more often ruled into columns and written in Latin or German, and in the Russian-ruled part they switch to Russian after 1868. The long paragraph is what families with roots around Warsaw, Łódź and Lublin will meet.)

That is why the numbers on this page are worth more to a family historian than they look. Here are the phrases you will actually meet.

Once those five patterns click, a page of copperplate handwriting stops being a wall and starts being a sentence. You will find the year, then the day, then the hour a child was born, then how old his mother was — and the record will suddenly be about people. The Polish alphabet page is the other half of this job, because the letters in those registers are the hard part.

Where numbers turn up in a Polish family

Three of these numbers were probably in your house without you ever calling them numbers.

Sto — a hundred. It’s the first word of the birthday song, Sto lat, which wishes somebody a hundred years and gets sung with more volume than tunefulness. (The whole song, and how to survive it, is on our Sto Lat page.)

Dziesiątek (jeh-SHON-tek) — “a ten,” and the Polish word for one decade of the rosary. If your grandmother said she was going to say a dziesiątek, she meant ten beads, not ten minutes, though it often came to the same thing.

Grosz (grosh) — a hundred groszy make one złoty, which is why the Polish for watching every penny is liczyć każdy grosz (LEE-chich KAHZH-dih grosh), “to count every grosz.” It’s an old phrase, and it belonged to people who genuinely had counted every one.

And if you’re carrying on with the words that filled those rooms, the 100 most common Polish words and the page on what to call your babcia are the natural next stops.

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