Clubs (♣)
Clubs, ♣, one of the four suits of a standard pack of cards: a black three-lobed leaf on a short stem. In contract bridge it is the lowest-ranking suit.
How to read it
Clubs and spades are the black suits of a standard pack. The French name is trèfle, which the International Playing-Card Society translates as clover; German packs with French suits call it Kreuz, cross. The English name is Italian: England joined the French sign to the name of the Italian suit bastoni, Britannica’s 1911 edition explains. Unicode encodes the solid sign as U+2663 BLACK CLUB SUIT and the outlined ♧ as U+2667 WHITE CLUB SUIT; the emoji ♣️ is named “club suit”.
Also searched as: ♣, black club suit, card club symbol, clubs symbol, club suit, trefle, trèfle.
Where clubs rank
In contract bridge clubs rank lowest, below spades, hearts and diamonds, under the World Bridge Federation’s laws. In Skat, Doppelkopf and Sheepshead they rank highest, John McLeod notes for the International Playing-Card Society.
Leaf or acorn?
Britannica (1911) says the French trèfle was named for its likeness to a trefoil leaf but was “in all probability copied from the acorn” of the German suits. German packs still have acorns.
Look-alikes
Unicode cross-refers the club suit to the shamrock, ☘ U+2618, a separate character that is not a card suit.
Read next
- Next in Playing card suitsCups, coins, swords and clubs (Spanish and Italian suits)The four suits of Spanish and Italian packs: cups, coins, swords and clubs. In Spanish they are copas, oros, espadas and bastos; in Italian coppe, denari, spade and bastoni.
- The same shape in Music symbolsWhole noteA whole note is an open oval with no stem. It is the longest note in everyday use: it lasts as long as two half notes or four quarter notes. In Britain it is called a semibreve.
More playing card suits
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with circles.
Sources
- Cards, Playing, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 5, pp. 324–326 (Wikisource transcription), Encyclopædia Britannica (Wikisource), pp. 325–326, marks of the suits
- 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
- 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: French-suited cards
- The Laws of Duplicate Bridge 2017, Law 1, The Pack, World Bridge Federation, Law 1A, Rank of Cards and Suits
- What is the order of suit ranking? (answer by John McLeod), playing-card FAQ, International Playing-Card Society, answer
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2663, 2667
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, game
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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