The curious case of the disappearing Polish S

“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

Polish is the second mo st-used Slavic language, right after Russian, and before Ukrainian. Contrary to those two, however, and similar to Western European languages such as German or French, Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet with a few customizations.

In exchange for those three, however, Polish adds nine additional diacritics using Latin characters as their base, all in relatively common use:

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