Full Adjective Declension Tables

This is the reference page: the full set of adjective endings for every gender, every number, and all seven cases. It looks like a lot of forms, but here is the encouraging truth up front — adjective declension is the most regular part of the Polish case system. Nouns have dozens of competing patterns; adjectives have essentially one. Once you can decline dobry, you can decline almost any adjective in the language. The only real variation is a spelling rule about -i versus -y, and it is fully predictable.

The hard-stem paradigm: dobry (good)

A "hard-stem" adjective ends in a hard consonant before the ending (dobr-, now-, star-). This is the default pattern. Here is the full singular paradigm across all three genders:

The seventh case, the vocative, never has its own adjective ending — it is always identical to the nominative (dobry, dobra, dobre, plural dobrzy / dobre). So whenever you address someone — Drogi Janie! ("Dear Jan!"), Szanowni Państwo! ("Ladies and gentlemen!") — the adjective simply reuses its nominative shape. That is one fewer form to learn, which is why the tables below focus on the six cases that actually move.

A few patterns jump out and they are worth memorising as patterns, not as 18 separate cells:

• Masculine and neuter are nearly identical. They differ only in the nominative (dobry vs dobre) and the accusative. Genitive, dative, instrumental, and locative are shared (dobrego, dobremu, dobrym, dobrym).
• Feminine genitive, dative, and locative are all dobrej. One form, three jobs.
• Feminine accusative and instrumental are both dobrą — note the nasal ą.
• Masculine/neuter instrumental and locative are both dobrym.

The plural

In the plural, the three genders collapse into just two forms — masculine-personal and non-masculine-personal — exactly as the noun system does:

The two columns differ only in the nominative and accusative. Genitive, dative, instrumental, and locative are identical across both plural categories (dobrych, dobrym, dobrymi, dobrych). So in practice the masculine-personal/non-masculine-personal distinction only bites you in two cells of the plural.

The masculine-personal nominative mutation

The masculine-personal nominative ending -i is "soft," and it softens the stem consonant before it. This is the one genuinely tricky corner of adjective declension. Learn the recurring shifts:

The accusative follows the animacy rule

The accusative is the one case where the adjective's ending depends on what kind of noun it modifies — exactly mirroring the noun animacy rule.

• Masculine animate (people, animals): accusative looks like the genitive → dobrego.
• Masculine inanimate (objects): accusative looks like the nominative → dobry.
• Feminine: always dobrą. Neuter: always dobre.

psa is animate → dobrego; telefon is inanimate → nowy (= nominative form). In the plural, the same logic applies: masculine-personal accusative is dobrych (= genitive), non-masculine-personal is dobre (= nominative).

The spelling rule: velar and soft stems (-i not -y)

Now the only real variation beyond dobry. Polish spelling forbids ky and gy. So adjectives whose stem ends in k or g write -i wherever dobry writes -y:

This is not a different declension — it is the same set of endings with i substituted for y purely because of how k and g are spelled. You write wysoki, never *wysoky; wysokim, never *wysokym. Everything else (-ego, -emu, -a, -ą, -e) is identical to dobry.

Truly soft-stem adjectives (those ending in a soft consonant, like tani "cheap" or głupi "stupid") follow their own closely related pattern, where -i replaces -y throughout and the neuter is -ie. They are covered on the soft-stem adjectives page; the velar wysoki/drugi type above is the far more common case and the one to lock in first.

Why adjectives are the easy part

Compare: a Polish noun might be dom / domu / domowi / dom / domem / domu and a different noun follows a completely different set of endings. But every hard-stem adjective in the language is -y / -ego / -emu / ... / -ym / -ym. There is one paradigm. Learn it once and you have learned the declension of thousands of adjectives, plus most ordinal numbers, most possessive pronouns, and the demonstratives, which all decline like adjectives. The case system's reputation for difficulty comes from the nouns — the adjectives are where the system is at its most beautifully regular.

Common Mistakes

After k/g, the -ym ending is written -im. The sound is the same; the spelling rule is absolute.

For masculine animate nouns the accusative adjective copies the genitive (dobrego), and the noun does too (psa). Beginners often leave both in the nominative.

The instrumental plural is -ymi (-imi after k/g). Don't fuse it with the genitive -ych.

Masculine-personal nominative plural triggers the mutation: dobry → dobrzy. The plain -e plural is for the non-masculine-personal category.

brat is masculine, so the dative adjectives are mojemu dobremu, not the feminine mojej dobrej.

Key Takeaways

• One paradigm (dobry) covers virtually every hard-stem adjective.
• Masculine and neuter share most cases; the feminine collapses gen/dat/loc into -ej.
• The plural has only two forms that differ (nom. and acc.); everything else is shared.
• The masculine-personal nominative plural mutates the stem (dobrzy, młodzi, wysocy); no other case does.
• The accusative obeys the animacy rule, just like nouns.
• Velar stems (wysoki, drugi) are identical to dobry but spell -i for -y after k/g — a spelling rule, not a new pattern.