![7 playing cards](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/7_playing_cards.jpg)
In
playing card
A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a fi ...
s, a suit is one of the categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several
pips (symbols) showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or additionally be indicated by the color printed on the card. The rank for each card is determined by the number of pips on it, except on
face card
In a deck of playing cards, the term face card (US) or court card (British and US), and sometimes Royalty, is generally used to describe a card that depicts a person as opposed to the pip cards. They are also known as picture cards, or until the e ...
s. Ranking indicates which cards within a suit are better, higher or more valuable than others, whereas there is no order between the suits unless defined in the rules of a specific
card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific.
Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ...
. In a single deck, there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called
jokers.
History
Modern Western playing cards are generally divided into two or three general suit-systems. The older Latin suits are subdivided into the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
and
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
suit-systems. The younger Germanic suits are subdivided into the
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
and
Swiss
Swiss may refer to:
* the adjectival form of Switzerland
* Swiss people
Places
* Swiss, Missouri
* Swiss, North Carolina
*Swiss, West Virginia
* Swiss, Wisconsin
Other uses
*Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports
*Swiss Internation ...
suit-systems. The
French suits are a derivative of the German suits but are generally considered a separate system.
Origin and development of the Latin suits
The earliest
card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific.
Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ...
s were
trick-taking game
A trick-taking game is a card or tile-based game in which play of a ''hand'' centers on a series of finite rounds or units of play, called ''tricks'', which are each evaluated to determine a winner or ''taker'' of that trick. The object of such g ...
s and the invention of suits increased the level of strategy and depth in these games. A card of one suit cannot beat a card from another regardless of its rank. The concept of suits predate playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as
Tien Gow
Tien Gow or Tin Kau () is the name of Chinese gambling games played with either a pair of dice or a set of 32 Chinese dominoes. In these games, Heaven is the top rank of the civil suit, while Nine is the top rank of the military suit. The civil su ...
.
Chinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit-system. The money-suit system is based on
denominations of currency:
Coins
A coin is a small, flat (usually depending on the country or value), round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to ...
,
Strings
String or strings may refer to:
*String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...
of Coins,
Myriad
A myriad (from Ancient Greek grc, μυριάς, translit=myrias, label=none) is technically the number 10,000 (ten thousand); in that sense, the term is used in English almost exclusively for literal translations from Greek, Latin or Sinospher ...
s of Strings (or of coins), and Tens of Myriads. Old Chinese coins had holes in the middle to allow them to be strung together. A string of coins could easily be misinterpreted as a stick to those unfamiliar with them.
By then the Islamic world had spread into
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
and had contacted China, and had adopted playing cards. The Muslims renamed the suit of myriads as cups; this may have been due to seeing a Chinese character for "myriad" () upside-down. The Chinese numeral character for Ten () on the Tens of Myriads suit may have inspired the Muslim suit of swords. Another clue linking these Chinese, Muslim, and European cards are the ranking of certain suits. In many early Chinese games like
Madiao
''Madiao'' (), also ''ma diao'', ''ma tiu'' or ''ma tiao'', is a late imperial Chinese trick-taking gambling card game, also known as the game of ''paper tiger''. The deck used was recorded by Lu Rong in the 15th century and the rules later by Pan ...
, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones. In the Indo-Persian game of
Ganjifa
Ganjifa, Ganjapa or Gânjaphâ, is a card game and type of playing cards that are most associated with Persia and India. After Ganjifa cards fell out of use in Iran before the twentieth century, India became the last country to produce them. The f ...
, half the suits were also inverted, including a suit of coins. This was also true for the European games of
Tarot
The tarot (, first known as '' trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, ...
and
Ombre
Ombre (, pronounced "omber") or l'Hombre is a fast-moving seventeenth-century trick-taking card game for three players and "the most successful card game ever invented."
Its history began in Spain around the end of the 16th century as a four-pe ...
. The inverting of suits had no purpose in terms of play but was an artifact from the earliest games.
These Turko-Arabic cards, called
Kanjifa, used the suits coins, clubs, cups, and swords, but the clubs represented polo sticks; Europeans changed that suit, as
polo
Polo is a ball game played on horseback, a traditional field sport and one of the world's oldest known team sports. The game is played by two opposing teams with the objective of scoring using a long-handled wooden mallet to hit a small hard ...
was an obscure sport to them.
The Latin suits are coins, clubs, cups, and swords. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, and were adopted from the cards imported from
Mamluk Egypt
The Mamluk Sultanate ( ar, سلطنة المماليك, translit=Salṭanat al-Mamālīk), also known as Mamluk Egypt or the Mamluk Empire, was a state that ruled Egypt, the Levant and the Hejaz (western Arabia) from the mid-13th to early 16th ...
and
Moorish Granada in the 1370s.
There are four types of Latin suits: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and an extinct archaic type. The systems can be distinguished by the pips of their long suits: swords and clubs.
* Northern Italian swords are curved outward and the clubs appear to be batons. They intersect one another.
* Southern Italian and Spanish swords are straight, and the clubs appear to be knobbly cudgels. They do not cross each other (The common exception being the three of clubs).
* Portuguese pips are like the Spanish, but they intersect like Northern Italian ones. They sometimes have dragons on the
ace
An ace is a playing card, Dice, die or domino with a single Pip (counting), pip. In the standard French deck, an ace has a single suit (cards), suit symbol (a heart, diamond, spade, or club) located in the middle of the card, sometimes large a ...
s. This system lingers on only in the
Tarocco Siciliano
The Tarocco Siciliano is a tarot deck found in Sicily and is used to play Sicilian tarocchi. It is one of the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks still used for games in Italy, the others being the more prevalent Tarocco Piemontese and the ...
and the
Unsun Karuta of Japan.
* The archaic system is like the Northern Italian one, but the swords are curved inward so they touch each other without intersecting.
*
Minchiate
Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy. It is no longer widely played. ''Minchiate'' can also refer to the special deck of 97 playing cards used in the game. The deck is closely related to the tarot cards, but ...
(a game that used a 97-card deck) used a mixed system of Italian clubs and Portuguese swords.
Despite a long history of trade with China,
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
was not introduced to playing cards until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s. Early locally made cards,
Karuta
are Japanese playing cards. Playing cards were introduced to Japan by Portuguese traders during the mid-16th century. These early decks were used for trick-taking games. The earliest indigenous ''karuta'' was invented in the town of Miike in C ...
, were very similar to Portuguese decks. Increasing restrictions by the
Tokugawa shogunate
The Tokugawa shogunate (, Japanese 徳川幕府 ''Tokugawa bakufu''), also known as the , was the military government of Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Tokugawa-jidai''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia ...
on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the
Hanafuda
are a style of Japanese playing cards. They are typically smaller than Western playing cards, only , but thicker and stiffer. On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, ''tanzaku'' (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects. One single ...
card deck that today is used most often for fishing-type games. The role of rank and suit in organizing cards became switched, so the hanafuda deck has 12 suits, each representing a month of the year, and each suit has 4 cards, most often two normal, one Ribbon and one Special (though August, November and December each differ uniquely from this convention).
Invention of German and French suits
During the 15th-century, manufacturers in German speaking lands experimented with various new suit systems to replace the Latin suits. One early deck had five suits, the Latin ones with an extra suit of shields. The Swiss-Germans developed their own suits of shields, roses, acorns, and bells around 1450. Instead of roses and shields, the Germans settled with hearts and leaves around 1460. The French derived their suits of ''trèfles'' (clovers or clubs ), ''carreaux'' (tiles or diamonds ), ''cœurs'' (hearts ), and ''piques'' (pikes or spades ) from the German suits around 1480. French suits correspond closely with German suits with the exception of the tiles with the bells but there is one early French deck that had crescents instead of tiles. The English names for the French suits of clubs and spades may simply have been carried over from the older Latin suits.
Tarot cards
Beginning around 1440 in northern Italy, some decks started to include an extra suit of (usually) 21 numbered cards known as
trionfi or
trump
Trump most commonly refers to:
* Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th president of the United States (2017–2021)
* Trump (card games), any playing card given an ad-hoc high rank
Trump may also refer to:
Businesses and organizations
* Donald J. T ...
s, to play
tarot card games
Tarot games are card games played with tarot decks, that is, decks with numbered permanent trumps parallel to the suit cards. The games and decks which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot are called Tarocchi in the original Italian, ...
. Always included in
tarot
The tarot (, first known as '' trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, ...
decks is one card,
the Fool or Excuse, which may be part of the trump suit depending on the game or region. These cards do not have pips or face cards like the other suits. Most tarot decks used for games come with French suits but Italian suits are still used in Piedmont, Bologna, and pockets of Switzerland. A few Sicilian towns use the Portuguese-suited
Tarocco Siciliano
The Tarocco Siciliano is a tarot deck found in Sicily and is used to play Sicilian tarocchi. It is one of the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks still used for games in Italy, the others being the more prevalent Tarocco Piemontese and the ...
, the only deck of its kind left in Europe.
The esoteric use of Tarot packs emerged in France in the late 18th century, since when special packs intended for
divination
Divination (from Latin ''divinare'', 'to foresee, to foretell, to predict, to prophesy') is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual. Used in various forms throughout histor ...
have been produced. These typically have the suits cups, pentacles (based on the suit of coins), wands (based on the suit of batons), and swords. The trump cards and Fool of traditional card playing packs were named the
Major Arcana
The Major Arcana are the named or numbered cards in a cartomantic tarot pack, the name being originally given by occultists to the trump cards of a normal tarot pack used for playing card games. There are usually 22 such cards in a standard 78-car ...
; the remaining cards, often embellished with occult images, were the Minor Arcana. Neither term is recognised by card players.
Suits in games with traditional decks
Trumps
In a large and popular category of
trick-taking game
A trick-taking game is a card or tile-based game in which play of a ''hand'' centers on a series of finite rounds or units of play, called ''tricks'', which are each evaluated to determine a winner or ''taker'' of that trick. The object of such g ...
s, one suit may be designated in each deal to be ''
trump
Trump most commonly refers to:
* Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th president of the United States (2017–2021)
* Trump (card games), any playing card given an ad-hoc high rank
Trump may also refer to:
Businesses and organizations
* Donald J. T ...
'' and all cards of the trump suit rank above all non-trump cards, and automatically prevail over them, losing only to a higher trump if one is played to the same trick. Non-trump suits are called plain suits.
Special suits
Some games treat one or more suits as being special or different from the others. A simple example is
Spades
SPAdes (St. Petersburg genome assembler) is a genome assembly algorithm which was designed for single cell and multi-cells bacterial data sets. Therefore, it might not be suitable for large genomes projects.
SPAdes works with Ion Torrent, PacBio ...
, which uses spades as a permanent trump suit. A less simple example is
Hearts, which is a kind of
point trick game in which the object is to avoid taking tricks containing hearts. With typical rules for Hearts (rules vary slightly) the queen of spades and the two of clubs (sometimes also the jack of diamonds) have special effects, with the result that all four suits have different strategic value.
Tarot
The tarot (, first known as '' trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, ...
decks have a dedicated trump suit.
Chosen suits
Games of the
Karnöffel Group
Karnöffel is a trick-taking card game which probably came from the upper-German language area in Europe in the first quarter of the 15th century. It first appeared listed in a municipal ordinance of Nördlingen, Bavaria, in 1426 among the games ...
have between one and four
chosen suit
The following is a glossary of terms used in card games. Besides the terms listed here, there are thousands of common and uncommon slang terms. Terms in this glossary should not be game-specific (e.g. specific to Bridge, Hearts, Poker or Rummy) ...
s, sometimes called selected suits or, misleadingly, trump suits. The chosen suits are typified by having a disrupted ranking and cards with varying privileges which may range from full to none and which may depend on the order they are played to the trick. For example, chosen Sevens may be unbeatable when led, but otherwise worthless. In Swedish
Bräus
Bräus (or Brus) is an old Swedish card game from the island of Gotland that differs from all others in that not all cards are actually playable.Smith (1993), pp. 36/37 The game is descended from the oldest known card game in Europe, Karnöffel, a ...
some cards are even unplayable. In games where the number of chosen suits is less than four, the others are called
unchosen suit
The following is a glossary of terms used in card games. Besides the terms listed here, there are thousands of common and uncommon slang terms. Terms in this glossary should not be game-specific (e.g. specific to Bridge, Hearts, Poker or Rummy), ...
s and usually rank in their natural order.
Ranking of suits
Whist-style rules generally preclude the necessity of determining which of two cards of different suits has higher rank, because a card played on a card of a different suit either automatically wins or automatically loses depending on whether the new card is a trump. However, some card games also need to define relative suit rank. An example of this is in auction games such as
bridge
A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...
, where if one player wishes to bid to make some number of heart tricks and another to make the same number of diamond tricks, there must be a mechanism to determine which takes precedence in the bidding order.
There is no standard order for the four suits and so there are differing conventions among games that need a suit hierarchy. Examples of suit order are (from highest to lowest):
*
Bridge
A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...
'' (for bidding and scoring)'' and
occasionally poker: , , , .
*
Preferans
Preferans ( rus, преферанс, p=prʲɪfʲɪˈrans) or Russian Preference is a 10-card plain-trick game with bidding, played by three or four players with a 32-card Piquet deck. It is a sophisticated variant of the Austrian game Préférence ...
: , , , . Only used for bidding.
*
Préférence
Préférence, frequently spelt Preference, is a Central and Eastern European 10-card plain-trick game with bidding, played by three players with a 32-card Piquet deck, and probably originating in early 19th century Austria, becoming the second mos ...
: , , , or , , , . Only used for bidding.
*
Five Hundred: , , , ''(for bidding and scoring)''
*
Ninety-nine: , , , ''(supposedly
mnemonic
A mnemonic ( ) device, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding.
Mnemonics make use of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues, and imag ...
as they have respectively 3, 2, 1, 0 lobes; see article for how this scoring is used)''
*
Skat: , , , ; or , , , ''(for bidding and to determine which Jack beats which in play)''
*
Cego
Cego is a Tarot game for three or four players played with eponymous German Tarot playing cards. The game was probably derived from the three-player Badenese tarot game of Dreierles after soldiers returned from the Iberian Peninsula during the Na ...
: , , , (for determining highest card in certain situations)
*
Big Two
Big two (also known as deuces, capsa, pusoy dos, dai di and various other names) is a card game of Cantonese origin. It is similar to the games of winner, daifugō, president, crazy eights, cheat, and other shedding games. The game is very popul ...
: , , ,
*
Thirteen
Thirteen or 13 may refer to:
* 13 (number), the natural number following 12 and preceding 14
* One of the years 13 BC, AD 13, 1913, 2013
Music
* 13AD (band), an Indian classic and hard rock band
Albums
* ''13'' (Black Sabbath album), 2013
* ...
: , , , .
Pairing or ignoring suits
The pairing of suits is a vestigial remnant of
Ganjifa
Ganjifa, Ganjapa or Gânjaphâ, is a card game and type of playing cards that are most associated with Persia and India. After Ganjifa cards fell out of use in Iran before the twentieth century, India became the last country to produce them. The f ...
, a game where half the suits were in reverse order, the lower cards beating the higher. In Ganjifa, progressive suits were called "strong" while inverted suits were called "weak". In Latin decks, the traditional division is between the long suits of swords and clubs and the round suits of cups and coins. This pairing can be seen in
Ombre
Ombre (, pronounced "omber") or l'Hombre is a fast-moving seventeenth-century trick-taking card game for three players and "the most successful card game ever invented."
Its history began in Spain around the end of the 16th century as a four-pe ...
and
Tarot card games
Tarot games are card games played with tarot decks, that is, decks with numbered permanent trumps parallel to the suit cards. The games and decks which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot are called Tarocchi in the original Italian, ...
. German and Swiss suits lack pairing but French suits maintained them and this can be seen in the game of
Spoil Five
Twenty-five is the Irish national card game, which also underlies the Canadian game of Forty-fives. Charles Cotton describes it in 1674 as "Five Fingers", a nickname applied to the Five of Trumps extracted from the fact that the Irish word ''cúig ...
.
In some games, such as
blackjack
Blackjack (formerly Black Jack and Vingt-Un) is a casino banking game. The most widely played casino banking game in the world, it uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global family of casino banking games known as Twenty-One. This fami ...
, suits are ignored. In other games, such as
Canasta
Canasta (; Spanish for "basket") is a card game of the rummy family of games believed to be a variant of 500 Rum. Although many variations exist for two, three, five or six players, it is most commonly played by four in two partnerships with tw ...
, only the color (red or black) is relevant. In yet others, such as bridge, each of the suit pairings are distinguished.
In
contract bridge
Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck. In its basic format, it is played by four players in two competing partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other around a table. Millions o ...
, there are three ways to divide four suits into pairs: by ''color'', by ''rank'' and by ''shape'' resulting in six possible suit combinations.
* Color is used to denote the ''red'' suits (hearts and diamonds) and the ''black'' suits (spades and clubs).
* Rank is used to indicate the ''
major
Major (commandant in certain jurisdictions) is a military rank of commissioned officer status, with corresponding ranks existing in many military forces throughout the world. When used unhyphenated and in conjunction with no other indicators ...
'' (spades and hearts) versus ''
minor
Minor may refer to:
* Minor (law), a person under the age of certain legal activities.
** A person who has not reached the age of majority
* Academic minor, a secondary field of study in undergraduate education
Music theory
*Minor chord
** Barb ...
'' (diamonds and clubs) suits.
* Shape is used to denote the ''pointed'' (diamonds and spades, which visually have a sharp point uppermost) versus ''rounded'' (hearts and clubs) suits. This is used in bridge as a mnemonic.
Four-color suits
![4coloraces1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/4coloraces1.jpg)
Some decks, while using the French suits, give each suit a different color to make the suits more distinct from each other. In
bridge
A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...
, such decks are known as ''no-
revoke
In trick-taking card games, a revoke (or renege, or ) is a violation of the rules regarding the play of tricks serious enough to render the round invalid. A revoke is a violation ranked in seriousness somewhat below overt cheating, and is cons ...
'' decks, and the most common colors are black spades, red hearts, blue diamonds and green clubs, although in the past the diamond suit usually appeared in a golden yellow-orange. A pack occasionally used in Germany uses green spades (comparable to leaves), red hearts, yellow diamonds (comparable to bells) and black clubs (comparable to acorns). This is a compromise deck devised to allow players from East Germany (who used German suits) and West Germany (who adopted the French suits) to be comfortable with the same deck when playing tournament
Skat after the
German reunification
German reunification (german: link=no, Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a united and fully sovereign state, which took place between 2 May 1989 and 15 March 1991. The day of 3 October 1990 when the Ge ...
.
Other suited decks
Suited-and-ranked decks
A large number of games are based around a deck in which each card has a rank and a suit (usually represented by a color), and for each suit there is exactly one card having each rank, though in many cases the deck has various special cards as well. Examples include Mü und Mehr,
Lost Cities
''Lost Cities'' is a 60-card card game, designed in 1999 by game designer Reiner Knizia and published by several publishers. The objective of the game is to mount profitable expeditions to one or more of the five lost cities (the Himalayas, the ...
, DUO, Sticheln,
Rage, Schotten Totten,
UNO, ''
Phase 10
Phase 10 is a card game created in 1982 by Kenneth Johnson and sold by Mattel, which purchased the rights from Fundex Games in 2010. Phase 10 is based on a variant of rummy known as contract rummy. It consists of a special deck equivalent to ...
'', Oh-No!,
Skip-Bo
Skip-Bo is a commercial version of the card game Spite and Malice, a derivative of Russian Bank (also known as Crapette or Tunj), which in turn originates from Double Klondike (also called ''Double Solitaire''). In 1967, Minnie Hazel "Skip" Bowman ...
, Roodles, and
Rook
Rook (''Corvus frugilegus'') is a bird of the corvid family. Rook or rooks may also refer to:
Games
*Rook (chess), a piece in chess
*Rook (card game), a trick-taking card game
Military
*Sukhoi Su-25 or Rook, a close air support aircraft
* USS ' ...
.
Other modern decks
Decks for some games are divided into suits, but otherwise bear little relation to traditional games. An example would be the board game
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal (; ) is an Islamic ivory-white marble mausoleum on the right bank of the river Yamuna in the Indian city of Agra. It was commissioned in 1631 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan () to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mu ...
, in which each card has one of four background colors, the rule being that all the cards played by a single player in a single round must be the same color. The selection of cards in the deck of each color is approximately the same and the player's choice of which color to use is guided by the contents of their particular hand.
In the trick-taking card game ''Flaschenteufel'' ("
The Bottle Imp
"The Bottle Imp" is an 1891 short story by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson usually found in the short story collection ''Island Nights' Entertainments''. It was first published in the '' New York Herald'' (February–March 1891) and ...
"), all cards are part of a single sequence ranked from 1 to 37 but split into three suits depending on its rank. players must follow the suit led, but if they are void in that suit they may play a card of another suit ''and this can still win the trick if its rank is high enough''. For this reason every card in the deck has a different number to prevent ties. A further strategic element is introduced since one suit contains mostly low-ranking cards and another, mostly high-ranking cards.
Whereas cards in a traditional deck have two classifications—suit and rank—and each combination is represented by one card, giving for example ''4 suits × 13 ranks = 52 cards'', each card in a
Set
Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics
*Set (mathematics), a collection of elements
*Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively
Electro ...
deck has four classifications each into one of three categories, giving a total of ''3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81'' cards. Any one of these four classifications could be considered a ''suit'', but this is not really enlightening in terms of the structure of the game.
Uses of playing card suit symbols
Card suit symbols occur in places outside card playing:
* The four suits were famously employed by the United States'
101st Airborne Division
The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) ("Screaming Eagles") is a light infantry division of the United States Army that specializes in air assault operations. It can plan, coordinate, and execute multiple battalion-size air assault operati ...
during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
to distinguish its four constituent regiments:
**Clubs (♣) identified the
327th Glider Infantry Regiment; currently worn by the 1st Brigade Combat Team.
**Diamonds (
♦) identified the
501st PIR. 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment is now part of the 4th Brigade (ABN),
25th Infantry Division in Alaska; the Diamond is currently used by the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade.
**Hearts (
♥) identified the
502nd PIR; currently worn by the 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
**Spades (♠) identified the
506th PIR
The 506th Infantry Regiment, originally designated the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (506th PIR) during World War II, is an airborne light infantry regiment of the United States Army. Currently a parent regiment under the U.S. Army Regimen ...
; currently worn by the 4th Brigade Combat Team.
Character encodings
In computer and other
digital media
Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ' ...
, suit symbols can be represented with
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...
, notably in the
ISO
ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization.
ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance
* Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007
* Iso ...
and
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
standards, or with
Web standard
Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of st ...
(
SGML
The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates":
* Declarative: Markup should des ...
's named entity
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
):
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
is the most frequently used encoding standard, and suits are in the
Miscellaneous Symbols Block (2600–26FF) of the Unicode.
Metaphorical uses
In some card games the card suits have a dominance order, for example: club (lowest) - diamond - heart - spade (highest). That led to ''in spades'' being used to mean ''more than expected, in abundance, very much''.
[ Retrieved 24 March 2017.]
In European games, the order is often different: diamond or bell (lowest) - heart - spade or leaf - club or acorn (highest). See, for example, the game of
Bruus
Bruus, formerly Brausebart or Brusbart, is a very old north German card game for four players in two teams of two. It was once highly popular but has since died out except for a few pockets in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. As Brusbart, it was th ...
.
Other expressions drawn from bridge and similar games include ''strong suit'' (any area of personal strength) and ''to follow suit'' (to imitate another's actions).
See also
*
Hearts (card game)
Hearts is an "evasion-type" trick-taking playing card game for four players, although most variations can accommodate between three and six players. It was first recorded in America in the 1880s and has many variants, some of which are also refe ...
*
Spades (card game)
Spades is a trick-taking card game devised in the United States in the 1930s. It can be played as either a partnership or solo/"cutthroat" game. The object is to take the number of tricks (also known as "books") that were bid before play of the h ...
*
Stripped deck
A stripped deck or short deck (US), short pack or shortened pack (UK), is a set of playing cards reduced in size from a full pack or deck by the removal of a certain card or cards. The removed cards are usually pip cards, but can also be court ca ...
*
Five-suit bridge
Five-suit bridge is a late 1930s variation of contract bridge played with a deck of 65 playing cards divided into five suits.
History
In the summer of 1937 in Vienna, Walter W. Marseille, with the help of Paul Stern, published rules for five-su ...
Notes
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Suit (Cards)
Playing cards
Contract bridge