Diamonds (♦)
Diamonds, ♦, one of the four suits of a standard pack of cards: a red diamond standing on one point. In contract bridge it ranks third, above clubs.
How to read it
Diamonds and hearts are the red suits of a standard pack. The French name is carreau, which the International Playing-Card Society translates as tile; German packs with French suits call it Karo. Unicode encodes the solid sign as U+2666 BLACK DIAMOND SUIT and the outlined ♢ as U+2662 WHITE DIAMOND SUIT; the emoji ♦️ is named “diamond suit”.
Also searched as: ♦, black diamond suit, card diamond symbol, carreau, diamonds symbol, diamond suit.
Where diamonds rank
In contract bridge diamonds rank third, below spades and hearts and above clubs, under the World Bridge Federation’s laws. In Pusoy Dos they rank highest, John McLeod notes for the International Playing-Card Society.
Look-alikes
Unicode cross-refers the diamond suit to the geometric black diamond, ◆ U+25C6, and the outlined suit sign ♢ to the white diamond ◇ and the lozenge ◊. Those are separate characters, not card suits.
In other packs
When the Portuguese played with French cards, Merlin wrote (quoted in Willshire’s 1876 British Museum catalogue), they called diamonds ouros, the name of their own coin suit, and hearts copas, cups. Spanish packs still have coins and cups.
Read next
- Next in Playing card suitsClubs (♣)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.
- The same shape in Road signsDeer crossing signA yellow diamond with a leaping deer. It warns of a stretch of road where deer often cross.
More playing card suits
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with diamonds.
Sources
- 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
- Cards, Playing, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 5, pp. 324–326 (Wikisource transcription), Encyclopædia Britannica (Wikisource), pp. 325–326, marks of the suits
- 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, 2662, 2666
- 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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