| Spades | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Native name | French:Pique |
| Deck | French-suited playing cards |
| Invented | 15th century |
Spades (♠) (French:Pique) is one of the fourplaying card suits in the standardFrench-suited playing cards. It has the same shape as theleaf symbol inGerman-suited playing cards but its appearance is more akin to that of an upside down blackheart with a stalk at its base. It symbolises thepike orhalberd, two medieval weapons, but is actually an adaptation of the German suit symbol ofLeaves created whenFrench suits were invented around 1480.[1]
Inbridge, spades rank as the highest suit. Inskat and similar games, it is the second-highest suit.
The word "Spade" is probably derived from theOld Spanishspada meaning "sword" and suggests thatSpanish suits were used in England before French suits.[2]
The French name for this suit,Pique ("pike"), meant, in the 14th century, a weapon formed by an iron spike placed at the end of apike.[3] In German it is known asPik. It corresponds to the suit ofleaves
(Laub,Grün,Schippen or, inBavaria,Gras) in theGerman-suited playing cards. In Switzerland, the suit is known asSchuufle ('shovel') and in many German regions, e.g., theRhineland, asSchüppe/Schippe ('shovel').
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 withClubs (suit), likeKlondike (solitaire). They form one of the twomajor suits inbridge (withhearts). In the officialskat tournament deck, spades are green, assuming the color of their German-deck equivalent.
The following gallery shows the spades in astandard 52-card deck ofFrench-suited playing cards. Not shown is theKnight of Spades used inTarot card games:
Four-color decks are sometimes used in tournaments or online.[4]In four-colour packs Spades may be:
in English bridge and poker packs and French and Swiss four-colour packs,[5]
in German skat tournament packs[5] or
in some American poker decksThe symbol ♠ is already in the computer code setCP437 and therefore also part of WindowsWGL4. InUnicode a black ♠ and a white ♤ spade are defined:
| Preview | ♠ | ♤ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | BLACK SPADE SUIT | WHITE SPADE SUIT | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 9824 | U+2660 | 9828 | U+2664 |
| UTF-8 | 226 153 160 | E2 99 A0 | 226 153 164 | E2 99 A4 |
| Numeric character reference | ♠ | ♠ | ♤ | ♤ |
| Named character reference | ♠, ♠ | |||
| CP437 | 6 | 06 | ||