Spades (♠)

How to read it

A standard pack has 52 cards, 13 in each of four suits; spades and clubs are the black suits, hearts and diamonds the red. The French name for the suit is pique, which the International Playing-Card Society translates as pike. The English name is Italian: England kept the French sign but called it after spade, swords, one of the Italian suits, Britannica’s 1911 edition explains. Unicode encodes the solid sign as U+2660 BLACK SPADE SUIT and the outlined ♤ as U+2664 WHITE SPADE SUIT; the emoji ♠️ is named “spade suit”.

Also searched as: ♠, black spade suit, pique, spades symbol, spade suit, spade symbol.

Where spades rank

It depends on the game. In contract bridge the suits rank downward spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, so spades are highest, under the World Bridge Federation’s Laws of Duplicate Bridge. In Skat and Doppelkopf clubs rank first and spades second, and in Preference and 500 spades rank last, John McLeod notes for the International Playing-Card Society. In poker the suits are equal.

Where the sign came from

Britannica (1911) held that the French pique was copied from the leaf of the German suits, took its name from the Italian sword, and was “not derived from its resemblance to a pike head, as commonly supposed”. Willshire’s 1876 catalogue of the British Museum’s cards dates the French suits to the second quarter of the 15th century; Britannica cites French cards of the 16th century. In the card games France borrowed from Spain, Willshire adds, the ace of spades was called espadille, little sword.

Look-alikes

The outlined ♤ is the same suit, encoded separately by Unicode. The Ace of spades is the one ace in an English or American pack with a large, decorated design.