Modern Western playing cards are generally divided into two or three general suit-systems. The older Latin suits are subdivided into the
Italian and
Spanish suit-systems. The younger Germanic suits are subdivided into the
German and
Swiss 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 games were
trick-taking games 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 predates playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as
Tien Gow.
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,
Strings of Coins,
Myriads 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 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, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones. In the Indo-Persian game of
Ganjifa, half the suits were also inverted, including a suit of coins. This was also true for the European games of
Tarot and
Ombre. 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 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 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 (except in the three of clubs). • Portuguese pips are like the Spanish, but they intersect like Northern Italian ones. They sometimes have dragons on the
aces. This system lingers on only in the
Tarocco Siciliano and the
Unsun Karuta and
Komatsufuda of Japan. Unsun Karuta additionally has a fifth
Guru suit (circular whirls). • The archaic system is like the Northern Italian one, but the swords are curved inward so they touch each other without intersecting. •
Minchiate (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 was not introduced to playing cards until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s. Early locally made cards,
Karuta, were very similar to Portuguese decks. Increasing restrictions by the
Tokugawa shogunate on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the
Hanafuda deck that today is used most often for fishing-type games and the Komatsufuda and
Kabufuda decks that are used for gambling. In hanafuda, the role of rank and suit in organizing cards became switched, so the 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). In komatsufuda and kabufuda, the designs of the suits became much more abstract; kabufuda eventually lost all distinctions of suit, with the deck having four identical copies of each rank. Unsun karuta did not face the same restrictions and instead developed an additional suit and additional ranks.
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
trumps, to play
tarot card games. Always included in
tarot 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 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 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 remaining cards, often embellished with occult images, were the Minor Arcana. Neither term is recognised by card players. == Suits ==