Joker (🃏)

How to read it

In euchre, a game that began in Alsace-Lorraine, the two jacks of the trump colour are the most powerful cards, the right and left bowers, from the German Bauer. American players added a card higher still, the Imperial Bower or Best Bower, and that card became the joker, the International Playing-Card Society explains. The World of Playing Cards dates it to the 1860s: in American packs from around 1863 and in English ones from around 1880, first as the Best Bower and later as the Little Joker or the Jolly Joker. Unicode has three joker characters, black 🃏, red and white, the red one “used as the third joker”; 🃏 is the emoji “joker”.

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Where the name came from

No one knows for certain. The IPCS gives the latest theory: the Best Bower was also called “the Euchre card”, said as “Juker card” and then “Joker card”, though neither in-between name has been found printed on a card. A simpler theory is that the extra card spread to other games as a wild card and was named for a card that changes character or pops up unexpectedly.

Why a jester

The early Best Bowers and jokers were not all jesters: the IPCS lists tricksters, children, stage characters and animals among them. A jester suits the card, it suggests, because he is unpredictable and because jesters belonged at the royal court with the kings, queens and jacks.