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Spades (suit)

Playing card suit

Summary

Playing card suit

Field	Value
image	SuitSpades.svg
image_size	120
native_name
deck	French-suited playing cards
invented	15th century

Spades () () is one of the four playing card suits in the standard French-suited playing cards. It has the same shape as the leaf symbol in German-suited playing cards but its appearance is more akin to that of an upside down black heart with a stalk at its base. It symbolises the pike or halberd, two medieval weapons, but is actually an adaptation of the German suit symbol of Leaves created when French suits were invented around 1480.

In bridge, spades rank as the highest suit. In skat and similar games, it is the second-highest suit.

Name

The word "Spade" is probably derived from the Old Spanish spada meaning "sword" and suggests that Spanish suits were used in England before French suits.

The French name for this suit, ("pike"), meant, in the 14th century, a weapon formed by an iron spike placed at the end of a pike. In German it is known as Pik. It corresponds to the suit of leaves [[File:Bay gras.svg|17px]] (Laub, Grün, Schippen or, in Bavaria, Gras) in the German-suited playing cards. In Switzerland, the suit is known as Schuufle ('shovel') and in many German regions, e.g., the Rhineland, as Schüppe/Schippe ('shovel').

Characteristics

The spade symbol is a very stylized spearhead shape, pointing upwards, the bottom widening into two arcs of a circle and sweeping towards the centre to then form a sort of foot.

Generally, spades are black so they can be used in some games as a pair with Clubs (suit), like Klondike (solitaire). They form one of the two major suits in bridge (with hearts). In the official skat tournament deck, spades are green, assuming the color of their German-deck equivalent.

Four-colour packs

The four [[ace]]s of a [[Four-color deck]]; here, Spades are black

Four-color decks are sometimes used in tournaments or online. In four-colour packs Spades may be:

black [[File:Spades.svg|20px|♠]] in English bridge and poker packs and French and Swiss four-colour packs,
green [[File:SuitSpades4colors.svg|16px|♠]] in German skat tournament packs or
blue [[File:Suitspadesblue.gif|16px|♠]] in some American poker decks

Coding

The symbol ♠ is already in the computer code set CP437 and therefore also part of Windows WGL4. In Unicode a black ♠ and a white ♤ spade are defined:

References

Literature

Allan, Elkan and Hannah Mackay (2007). The Poker Encyclopedia. London: Portico.
Dummett, Sir Michael (1980). The Game of Tarot. Duckworth, London.
Parlett, David (2008). The Penguin Book of Card Games. London, New York, Toronto: Penguin.

References

Dummett (1980), p. 22.
Parlett (2008), p. xiv.
Allan & Mackay (2007), p. 155.
[http://a_pollett.tripod.com/cards19.htm ''Gallery 3 - Sizes, Shapes and Colours''] at a_pollett.tripod.com. Retrieved 4 Aug 2020.
"Pique".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

card-suits pikes-(weapon)

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