Poland Emoji

The Poland flag emoji 🇵🇱 is two plain stripes, white over red, the colours of the coat of arms: a white eagle on a red shield. Poland adopted the flag in 1919, a year after it regained independence, and celebrates it on Flag Day, 2 May. Fans who want the colours without the flag stack hearts 🤍❤️ or squares ⬜🟥. Get the order right: turned upside down, red over white, it becomes the flag of Indonesia 🇮🇩 or Monaco 🇲🇨, a mix-up Poles notice at once.

Like every country flag, 🇵🇱 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇵 + 🇱 for the country code PL. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters PL instead. Paste it anyway: an iPhone or Android user sees 🇵🇱. There is no flag-with-eagle emoji; that version of the flag, with the coat of arms in the white stripe, is used officially abroad and at sea, and online people simply write 🇵🇱🦅.

The White Eagle (Orzeł Biały) 🦅 is one of the oldest Polish symbols. Legend says Lech, founder of the Poles, saw a white eagle on its nest against a red sunset and built his town there, Gniezno, the first capital. The eagle wears a golden crown 👑, which the communist authorities removed after the Second World War and free Poland put back in 1990. ⚓ is the Kotwica, the anchor formed from the letters P and W (Polska Walcząca, Fighting Poland) that the wartime underground painted on walls; it marks the Warsaw Uprising, which began on 1 August 1944 at 17:00, the hour when sirens still stop Warsaw every year. 🇪🇺 belongs here too: Poland joined the European Union in 2004.

Polish food emoji: pierogi, żurek and pączki

🥟 is a popular Polish food emoji: the emoji dumpling stands for pierogi, half-moon dumplings filled with potato and white cheese (ruskie), sauerkraut and mushrooms, meat, or summer fruit. 🍲 is soup, the backbone of a Polish lunch: żurek, sour rye soup with white sausage and egg, often served in a hollowed loaf 🍞; rosół, the Sunday chicken broth; and barszcz, the ruby beetroot soup, which can be represented by the generic root vegetable emoji 🫜. 🥬 is bigos, the hunter's stew of sauerkraut, cabbage and meats, and gołąbki, cabbage leaves rolled around meat and rice. 🥒🫙 are pickles: ogórki kiszone, cucumbers fermented in brine with dill and garlic, still put up in jars at home every summer.

🌭 is the nearest emoji to kiełbasa, the Polish sausage. 🥩 is kotlet schabowy, the breaded pork cutlet of every Sunday dinner, served with 🥔 potatoes, and 🍖 golonka, roast pork knuckle. 🥞 covers both naleśniki (thin pancakes) and placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes). 🥯 belongs to Kraków: the ring-shaped obwarzanek krakowski is sold from blue carts all over the city, and the bagel itself is first recorded there, in Jewish community rules of 1610. 🧀 is oscypek, the smoked sheep's cheese of the Tatra highlanders.

For something sweet, 🍰 is sernik (cheesecake), 🥧🍎 szarlotka, the apple cake, and 🍪 the gingerbread (pierniki) of Toruń; Poland grows more apples than any other country in the EU. 🍩 is the pączek, a round doughnut filled with rose jam and eaten by the dozen on Fat Thursday. To drink: 🥃 vodka (wódka), including Żubrówka with a blade of bison grass in every bottle, 🍺🍻 beer, and 🍯 miód pitny, Polish mead, graded by how much honey goes into it. The toast is Na zdrowie! and the wish before a meal Smacznego!

Kraków, Warsaw and places to see in Poland

🐉 is Kraków's emoji. The Wawel Dragon (Smok Wawelski) lived in a cave under Wawel Hill and ate the town's sheep until a young shoemaker fed it a sheep stuffed with sulphur 🐑; the dragon drank from the Vistula until it burst. Today a bronze dragon at the mouth of the cave breathes real fire every few minutes. Above it stands Wawel Castle 🏰, seat of Polish kings, and on the Main Square 🎺 is the hejnał, the bugle call played every hour from the tower of St Mary's Basilica. It breaks off in the middle of a note, in memory of a trumpeter said to have been shot through the throat while sounding the alarm.

🧜 is Warsaw: the Syrenka, a mermaid with sword and shield, is on the city's coat of arms and stands in the Old Town Market Square, which was rebuilt after 1945 as part of Warsaw's UNESCO-listed Historic Centre. 🏙️ is the modern skyline around the Palace of Culture and Science. 🏰 also stands for Malbork, the brick castle of the Teutonic Knights, the largest brick castle in the world and often named the largest castle by land area. 🧂⛏️ is the Wieliczka salt mine near Kraków, where miners carved a whole chapel, chandeliers included, out of rock salt. ⛪ is the church at the heart of every town and village, from Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, home of the Black Madonna, to the wooden churches of the south, and 🕍 recalls that Poland was for centuries home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, remembered in Kraków's Kazimierz and Warsaw's POLIN Museum.

Nature has its emoji too. 🏔️ is the Tatra Mountains and the resort of Zakopane, with Rysy (2,499 m) the highest Polish peak. 🌲🦬 is Białowieża Forest, one of the last primeval forests of Europe, where the European bison (żubr) was brought back after dying out in the wild. 🍄 is grzybobranie, the national autumn pastime of mushroom picking. 🌊 is the Baltic coast, from the sand dunes of Łeba to the pier at Sopot, and ⛵ the Masurian lakes, Poland's best-known place to sail.

Polish holidays and the emoji people send

Wigilia, Christmas Eve, is the biggest night of the year. Supper starts when the first star ⭐ appears in the sky, after everyone shares the opłatek, a thin wafer, and exchanges wishes. Tradition calls for twelve meatless dishes: barszcz with tiny mushroom dumplings, pierogi 🥟, mushrooms 🍄 and fried carp 🐟, which some families still buy live and keep in the bathtub 🛁 until the day. An empty place is laid 🍽️ for an unexpected guest. Gifts 🎁 come under the tree 🎄 that evening, though children already got sweets from St Nicholas 🎅 on 6 December, Mikołajki. The greeting is Wesołych Świąt!

Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek), the last Thursday before Lent, is 🍩 day: queues form outside bakeries for pączki. Easter is 🥚🧺🐣🐑: on Holy Saturday families carry a basket of painted eggs (pisanki), bread, salt, sausage and a sugar or butter lamb to church to be blessed, the święconka. On Easter Monday comes śmigus-dyngus, when everyone tries to soak everyone else 💦🔫🪣, with water pistols, buckets, anything. The greeting is Wesołego Alleluja!

On 1 November, All Saints' Day, families travel across the country to tidy the graves 🪦 of their relatives and light candles in glass lanterns (znicze) 🕯️, and cemeteries glow all night. On the eve of St Andrew, 29 November, Andrzejki parties pour hot wax through the bow of a key 🔑 into cold water and read the future 🔮 from the shadow of the shape. Birthdays and name days (imieniny) bring flowers 💐 and the song Sto lat, "a hundred years" 🎂🥂, often sung at celebrations, and the harvest ends with dożynki 🌾 and its wreaths of grain. National days are 3 May, Constitution Day, for the 1791 constitution 📜, the first modern written one in Europe, and 11 November, Independence Day, for 1918, when 🇵🇱 returned to the map after 123 years of partition.

Famous Poles, history and sports: more Poland emoji

🔭 is Nicolaus Copernicus, born in Toruń in 1473, who put the Sun at the centre of the solar system. 🧪 is Maria Skłodowska-Curie, born in Warsaw, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win in two sciences, physics and chemistry; she named the element polonium after Poland. 🎹 is Fryderyk Chopin, whose heart is kept in a pillar of Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, and whose name is on the piano competition held there every five years. 🐺⚔️ is The Witcher, Andrzej Sapkowski's monster hunter of the School of the Wolf, and 🎮 the Polish studios that made him a video-game star.

History in emoji: ⚔️ is Grunwald, 1410, where Polish and Lithuanian armies defeated the Teutonic Knights, and 🪽🐎 the winged hussars, cavalrymen whose feathered wings were usually fixed to their saddles and who charged at Vienna in 1683 under King Jan III Sobieski. ✊ is Solidarność, Solidarity, the trade union born in the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980 that helped bring down communism in 1989.

In sport, 🇵🇱⚽ is the national team, Biało-czerwoni (the White-and-Reds), and Robert Lewandowski. 🏐 is volleyball, which Poland follows like a second football and where the men have been world champions three times. 🎾 is Iga Świątek, 🎿 ski jumping, a winter obsession since Adam Małysz and Kamil Stoch, and 🏍️ speedway, the motorcycle racing on dirt ovals whose Polish league is widely regarded as the strongest in the world.

Polish letters and the złoty zł: how to type them

The Polish alphabet has 32 letters: the Latin ones without q, v and x, which appear only in foreign words, plus nine of its own, Ą Ć Ę Ł Ń Ó Ś Ź Ż. The ogonek ("little tail") makes ą and ę nasal vowels; the kreska on ć ń ś ź softens the consonant, and ó is pronounced exactly like u; ż is like the s in "pleasure", and ł, once a dark l, is now said like the w in "water". The marks change meaning: kąt is an angle, kat an executioner; łaska is grace, laska a walking stick. Font designers test their Polish with Zażółć gęślą jaźń, a short phrase that uses all nine letters.

On Windows, add the Polish (Programmers) keyboard, the standard Polish layout: it keeps the US layout and adds the letters with Right Alt, so AltGr+A gives ą, AltGr+L ł, AltGr+Z ż and AltGr+X ź. On a Mac the Polish Pro layout does the same with Option. On a phone, long-press a, c, e, l, n, o, s or z. In HTML, ó is ó and the others have entities such as ł, ą and ż. Polish quotation marks open low and close high, „tak”, with «angle quotes» for a quote inside a quote.

The złoty uses the two-character symbol zł after the amount, 25 zł or 9,99 zł, with a comma for decimals; 1 złoty is 100 groszy (gr), and the code is PLN. Poland is in the EU but keeps the złoty rather than the euro. Polish is spoken by almost all of Poland's roughly 37.3 million people; regional languages include Silesian and Kashubian, and the Polish language collection covers the alphabet in full, with the neighbouring German, Ukrainian and Lithuanian ones.