what does this symbol mean?

Playing card suits

Spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs, the suits of Spanish, Italian and German packs, the ace of spades and the joker: what each one is.

Test yourself: Playing card suits quiz

The four suits 4 symbols

Other suits 2 symbols

Special cards 2 symbols

About playing card suits

A standard pack of 52 cards has four suits of 13: spades ♠, hearts ♥, diamonds ♦ and clubs ♣. Hearts and diamonds are the red suits, spades and clubs the black. These pages say what each sign is called, how it ranks and which Unicode character it is. They also cover the suits of Spanish, Italian and German packs, and two cards with stories of their own, the ace of spades and the joker.

The four suits

These are the French suits, pique, coeur, carreau and trèfle, which the International Playing-Card Society translates as pike, heart, tile and clover. Willshire’s 1876 catalogue of the British Museum’s cards dates them to the second quarter of the 15th century. England took the French signs but gave two of them Italian names: spades from spade, swords, and clubs from bastoni, Britannica’s 1911 edition explains. Unicode encodes a solid and an outlined form of each, from U+2660 BLACK SPADE SUIT to U+2667 WHITE CLUB SUIT.

Suit order

Suit order depends on the game. The World Bridge Federation’s Laws of Duplicate Bridge rank the suits downward spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs. In Skat clubs come first, and in poker, John McLeod notes for the IPCS, all the suits are equal.

Other suit systems

Spanish and Italian packs have cups, coins, swords and clubs, and German packs have hearts, bells, leaves and acorns. Britannica (1911) and Willshire disagree over which of the two is older.

Two special cards

The ace of spades is decorated because it was once a British tax stamp: the tax office printed it from 1765, and the tax on playing cards lasted until 1960. The joker is American, added by euchre players in the 1860s as the Best Bower, a trump above every other card.

Sources

  1. The Laws of Duplicate Bridge 2017, Law 1, The Pack, World Bridge Federation, Law 1A, Rank of Cards and Suits
  2. A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), General history: marks, designs, etc., pp. 30–34
  3. An introduction (playing-card FAQ), formerly at cs.man.ac.uk/playing-cards, now hosted by the IPCS, International Playing-Card Society, National suit systems
  4. Cards, Playing, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 5, pp. 324–326 (Wikisource transcription), Encyclopædia Britannica (Wikisource), pp. 325–326, marks of the suits
  5. Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2660–2667
  6. What is the order of suit ranking? (answer by John McLeod), playing-card FAQ, International Playing-Card Society, answer
  7. Card Design: The Ace of Spades, by Paul Bostock, April 2017; the author is a Court Assistant of the Company, The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, article
  8. The Ace of Spades, playing-card FAQ, International Playing-Card Society, Introduction
  9. The Joker Card, The World of Playing Cards, The Joker card

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research