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Circles, bamboo and characters — three suits numbered one to nine.
Also known as: Circles, bamboo and characters, Chinese tiles with dots and sticks, Mahjong tiles
Three suits of nine ranks each, four copies of every tile. The suits are named for what the tiles depict, and the one-of-bamboo is conventionally drawn as a bird, which is the single detail that most confuses a first-time reader.
Three suits of nine ranks: circles, bamboo, and characters marked with Chinese numerals. Four identical copies of each tile make 108 suit tiles in a standard set.
The one of bamboo is conventionally drawn as a bird rather than as a single stick, so the tile that looks least like its suit is the one a reader is most likely to meet first.
A bird tile is a bamboo one, not a separate honour tile.
The suits are conventionally taken to represent strings of coins, the coins themselves and the number of strings, which reads the circles as coins and the bamboo as the cords they were threaded on.
Small rectangular tiles carrying either arrangements of concentric circles, arrangements of short segmented sticks, or a Chinese numeral above a second character.
Suit tiles and honour tiles make up one set.