ogonki

Ogonki is a word that appears in several Slavic languages and in typographic terminology, with several distinct senses in linguistics, typography, geography, and culture.

In Russian, огоньки (ogonyki) is the diminutive plural of огонь (fire), meaning “little fires” or “sparks.” It is used poetically and in everyday speech to denote small lights, especially decorative or festive lights.

In typography, ogonek is a diacritic placed under certain vowels, notably ą and ę, to indicate nasalization. The plural form ogonki refers to the set of such diacritic marks in a font or the orthography of a language.

Ogonki is also the name of several inhabited localities in Eastern Europe, including villages in Russia and Poland. The exact number and locations can reflect historical changes in borders and administrative divisions.

Relatedly, the name Ogonyok (with a different transliteration) is the title of a long-running Russian weekly magazine; the root is the same word meaning “little flame” in Russian, illustrating a shared semantic heritage with ogonki.