SYM·0101 · French suits
Spade
the wrong name on the right shape
- Unicode
- U+2660 black spade suit
- Meaning
- One of the four French card suits — and a mark whose English name belongs to a different system entirely.
- History
- The French suits were settled around 1480 as pique, cœur, carreau and trèfle — pike-head, heart, paving tile and clover — chosen because they stencil in two colours, which made cards cheap. English took the shapes from France and the names from the Italian and Spanish suits: spade means swords and bastoni batons, so English speakers name a pike-head after a sword and a clover after a club. The ace of spades is the ornate one because it carried the printed duty stamp.
- Variants
- Pointed or rounded shoulders; the ace of spades is decorated by convention rather than rule.
- Related
- ♥ Heart (SYM·0083); ♦ ♣ the other two suits.
- Appears
- Every deck of playing cards in the Western tradition, and the iconography built on them.
- Evolution
- Manufacturing shortcut → suit system → a set of English names describing the wrong pictures.
Sources · 3
- documented The French suit system of c. 1480, and its two-colour stencilling advantage.
- documented The English suit names as borrowings from the Italian and Spanish systems — swords and batons, not pikes and clovers.
- documented The duty stamp on the ace of spades as the origin of its decoration.