We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
The four marks that divide a deck, and where they actually came from.
Also known as: Card suits, Suit symbols on cards, Shapes on playing cards
Four suit marks divide a standard deck into equal quarters. The French set now used almost everywhere was a printing economy rather than a symbolic scheme: two flat colours and four simple silhouettes stencil far faster than the engraved German and Italian suits they replaced.
The four marks — spade, heart, diamond and club — that divide a standard deck into four suits of thirteen cards each.
A French simplification, made around 1480, of the German suits of leaves, hearts, bells and acorns, which were themselves a variation on the Italian cups, coins, swords and batons. The French shapes won because they print: two flat colours and four solid silhouettes can be stencilled, where the older suits needed engraving.
France, then Europe · from c. 1480
The claim that the suits stand for the four classes of medieval society — clergy, nobility, merchants and peasantry — or for the seasons, elements or humours, is a later invention with no support in the record. So is the arithmetic that makes fifty-two cards the weeks of the year.
Repeated in almost every popular account. The suits are a printing convenience that happens to have become universal.
Regional patterns still differ. German-suited and Swiss-suited decks remain in ordinary use across central Europe, and Italian and Spanish decks in the south, so a deck that looks wrong is usually a different regional tradition rather than a novelty.
Europe
Four small filled shapes printed in red and black: a pointed leaf on a stem, a rounded lobed form, a four-pointed lozenge, and a three-lobed cloverleaf on a stem.
The spade is one of the four French suits.