nie ma

See also: niema and niemą

Polish

Alternative forms

Etymology

Clipping of nie masz.^[1] First attested in the first half of the 20th century. Displaced Old Polish nietu.

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /ˈɲɛ.ma/
Audio: (file)
Rhymes: -ɛma
Homophone: niema

Phrase

nie ma (past nie było, future nie będzie)

Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see nie,‎ ma. [with genitive]
On nie ma czasu. ― He doesn't have time.
(impersonal, idiomatic) to be gone, to not be present, to not exist, there is no [with genitive]
Nie ma chleba. ― There is no bread.

Nie ma mowy! ― No way! (literally, “There is no speech!”)

Nigdy nikogo nie ma w domu. ― Never is there anyone home.

Usage notes

(1): is entirely regular.

(2): is only irregular in the present tense, all other forms are a combination of nie and być (appropriately conjugated), as follows: there wasn't → nie było; there won't be → nie będzie; there wouldn't be → nie byłoby.

Derived terms

phrases

Trivia

According to Słownik frekwencyjny polszczyzny współczesnej (1990), nie ma is one of the most used words in Polish, appearing 33 times in scientific texts, 4 times in news, 35 times in essays, 80 times in fiction, and 152 times in plays, each out of a corpus of 100,000 words, totaling 304 times, making it the 166th most common word in a corpus of 500,000 words.^[2]

References

^ Bańkowski, Andrzej (2000) “nie ma”, in Etymologiczny słownik języka polskiego [Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language] (in Polish)
^ Ida Kurcz (1990) “nie ma”, in Słownik frekwencyjny polszczyzny współczesnej [Frequency dictionary of the Polish language] (in Polish), volume 1, Kraków, Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Języka Polskiego, page 280