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Voivodeships of Poland

Highest-level administrative division of Poland

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Through Poland, Governor and Suffix

The Polish local government reforms adopted in 1998, which went into effect on 1 January 1999, reduced the number of voivodeships to sixteen. These 16 replaced the 49 former voivodeships that had existed from 1 July 1975, and bear a greater resemblance (in territory, but not in name) to the voivodeships that existed between 1950 and 1975.

Today's voivodeships are mostly named after historical and geographical regions, while those prior to 1998 generally took their names from the cities on which they were centered. The new units range in area from under 10,000 km2 (3,900 sq mi) (Opole Voivodeship) to over 35,000 km2 (14,000 sq mi) (Masovian Voivodeship), and in population from under one million (Opole Voivodeship) to over five million (Masovian Voivodeship).

Administrative authority at the voivodeship level is shared between a government-appointed governor called a voivode (wojewoda), an elected assembly called a sejmik, and an executive board (zarząd województwa) chosen by that assembly, headed by a voivodeship marshal (marszałek województwa). Voivodeships are further divided into powiats ('counties') and gminas ('communes' or 'municipalities'), the smallest administrative divisions of Poland.

Etymology and use

Some English-language sources, in historical contexts, speak of "palatinates" rather than "voivodeships". The term "palatinate" traces back to the Latin palatinus, which traces back to palatium ("palace").

More commonly used now is province or voivodeship. The latter is a loanword-calque hybrid formed on the Polish "województwo".

Some writers argue against rendering województwo in English as "province", on historical grounds: before the third, last Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1795, each of the main constituent regions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Lithuania, and Royal Prussia—was sometimes idiosyncratically referred to as a "province" (prowincja). According to the argument, such a prowincja (for example, Greater Poland) cannot consist of a number of subdivisions ("województwa", the plural of "województwo") that are likewise called "provinces". This, however, is an antiquarian consideration, as the word "province" has not been used in Poland in this sense of a region for over two centuries; and those former larger political units, all now obsolete, can now be referred to in English as what they actually were: "regions".

The Polish województwo, designating a second-tier Polish or Polish–Lithuanian administrative unit, derives from wojewoda, (etymologically, a 'warlord', 'war leader' or 'leader of warriors', giving it the same etymology as the English word "Duchy", but now simply the governor of a województwo) and the suffix -ztwo (a "state or condition").

The English voivodeship, which is a hybrid of the loanword voivode and -ship (the latter a suffix that calques the Polish suffix -ztwo), has never been much used and is absent from many dictionaries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first appeared in 1792, spelt "woiwodship", in the sense of "the district or province governed by a voivode." The word subsequently appeared in 1886 also in the sense of "the office or dignity of a voivode."

Poland's Commission on Standardization of Geographic Names outside the Republic of Poland prefers the form which omits the 'e', recommending the spelling "voivodship", for use in English.

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