Suit (cards) - Traditional Western Playing Cards

Traditional Western Playing Cards

Many different types of deck have been used in Europe since the introduction of playing cards around the 14th century, and several types of deck are still used in various regions for various games. Almost all of them have in common that there are exactly four suits, and numbers or other symbols indicate 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 game. There is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. The differences between European decks are mostly in the number of cards in each suit; for example,

• 13 in the commonly-known French deck,
• 14 in the French Tarot game,
• 12 in Spain,
• 10 in Italy and in some games in Spain,
• 9 in Switzerland for the Jass,
• 8 in some games in Germany and Austria, e.g. Skat
• 8 for Belote in France,
• 5 in Hungarian Illustrated Tarock,

and in the inclusion or exclusion of an extra series of (usually) 21 numbered cards known as tarocks or trumps, sometimes considered as a fifth suit, but more properly regarded as a group of special suitless cards, to form what is known as a Tarot deck.

It is claimed that Tarocchino was invented in 1419 and thus the Italo-Spanish style suits are likely to be the original suits, the suits found on the divinatory Tarot deck, and the suits found in the oldest surviving European decks. However, non-Tarot playing cards are considered to be a French invention. The French style suits became popular after they were introduced, largely because cards using those suits were less expensive to manufacture; the traditional suits required a woodcut for each card, while with the French suits the "pip" cards—the cards containing only a certain number of the suit objects—could be made by stencils or stamps, and only the "court" cards, the cards with human figures, required woodcut illustrations. All four European suit styles - Italo-Spanish, Latin-Tarot, Germanic and French - originally referred to the four major feudal classes: military, clergy, merchant/trade, and agriculture.

The four standard symbols were first used on French playing cards, made in Rouen and Lyon in the 15th century, around the time that playing cards were first mass-produced by woodcuts.

In bridge, the suits rank clubs (lowest), diamonds, hearts, spades (highest). In some card games of Germanic origin such as Skat or Sheepshead, the suits rank clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds.

Clubs is also known as clovers or flowers. The clubs symbol was believed to be an adaptation of the German suit of acorns.

In the Germanic countries the spade was the symbol associated with the blade of a spade. The English term "spade" originally did not refer to the tool but was derived from the Italian word spada = "sword" from the Italo-Spanish suit. Those symbols were later changed to resemble the digging tool instead to avoid confusion. In German and Dutch the suit is also, alternatively, named Schüppen and schoppen (shovel).

The English names given to the standard French suit signs are not the same in meaning as the French names except for Hearts, which could explain the popular belief that Clubs (which were originally Fleurs meaning flowers, later Trèfles meaning clovers) were derived from Italian Bastoni (Batons). However, 18th century French cartomancers such as Antoine Court de Gébelin and Etteilla associated Clubs with Italian Coins (Tarot Pentacles) and Diamonds with Italian Batons (Tarot Wands), an association which becomes more obvious when observing these Minor Arcana suit patterns of the Tarot of Marseilles.