♣ | clubs

“Clubs” is another confusing name. Italian and Spanish playing cards have a suit called bastoni / bastos (i.e. clubs), and these really show clubs or cudgels. But not in a French deck. According to Wikipedia,

The shape of the clubs symbol is believed to be an adaptation of the German suit of acorns. Clubs are also known as clovers, flowers and crosses. The French name for the suit is trèfles meaning clovers, the Italian name for the suit is fiori meaning flowers and the German name for the suit is Kreuz meaning cross.

♣ indeed looks very much like shamrock, ☘. The Russian names of this suit are крести (from крест, “cross”) or трефы (from German Treff and that from French trèfle).

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♦ | diamonds

In English, rhombus (◊) is often called a diamond. But why? The earliest and simplest of diamond cuts, the point cut, is a regular octahedron. A projection of an octahedron which looks like a rhombus could have been a reason to name this shape a “diamond”. Somehow this geometrical observation did not find its way to other languages. By the mid-15^th century, more advanced cuts were introduced and “diamond-shaped” diamonds were passé.

The suit ♦ of a French deck, known as carreaux (tiles) was derived in 15^th century from the German suit of Schellen (bells). Those round bells look nothing like the tiles, though. One might think that French, for simplicity sake, just decided to “square the circle”. According to Wikipedia, however, “between the transition from the suit of bells to tiles there was a suit of crescents”. Interestingly, the bell—diamond connection of ♦ still lives in the Russian name бубны (or буби), from бубенцы, “bells”.

More photos related to cards, diamonds and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

♠ | spades

Are you missing Chinese characters already? Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about them. But let me continue with playing cards. According to Wikipedia,

The Latin suits consist of coins, clubs, cups, and swords. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, having been adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. <...> Ultimately the suits can trace their roots back to China where playing cards were first invented. <...> The concept of suits predate playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as Tien Gow.

[Tien Gow is a Westernised 天九 (Pinyin: tiān jiǔ) which, as you may have figured out by now, literally translates as “Heaven and Nine”.]

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, 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. The Mamluks called their suit of cups Myriads and this may have been due to inverting the Chinese character for myriad (万). The Mamluk suit of swords may also have been inspired by the Chinese numeral for Ten (十).

If this is indeed so, then swords (what we now call “spades” in English was derived from the Spanish word espada, “sword”) must be a direct descendant of 十 and the oldest suit of Chinese origin which we still use in a French deck.

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♥ | heart

Many, many years ago, when I first saw a real (chicken) heart, I was surprised that it did not look at all like I thought the “real” heart should. No encyclopaedias and medical textbooks available to me then and since mentioned the “heart-shaped” hearts either. And what ♥ has to do with love? True, the heart keeps us alive, but shouldn’t there be organs a bit more directly responsible for love? It was not until I read Betty Dodson’s Sex for One that I got an explanation — mind you, not the explanation, just a hypothesis... still, way better than anything I came across before.

The geometric shape ♥ was known since antiquity but was rather associated with foliage than heart. According to Wikipedia, the first known depictions of a heart as a symbol of romantic love date to the 13^th—14^th centuries, but the hearts in question were shown either pine cone- or pear-shaped. Maybe those latter objects were just pears.

Various hypotheses attempted to connect the “heart shape” as it evolved in the late medieval period with instances of the geometric shape in antiquity. Such theories are modern, proposed from the 1960s onward, and they remain speculative, as no continuity between the supposed ancient predecessors and the late medieval tradition can be shown. Specific suggestions include: the shape of the seed of the silphium plant, used in ancient times as an herbal contraceptive, and stylized depictions of features of the human female body, such as the female’s buttocks, pubic mound, or spread vulva. <...> Inverted heart symbols have been used in heraldry as stylized testicles (coglioni in Italian) as in the canting arms of the Colleoni family of Milan.

Whatever theory is right, I hope from now on you’d think a few moments more before investing in a T-shirt or tea mug with “I ♥ something” on it.

The red heart ♥ has been used on playing cards as a suit since the 15^th century. Hearts, Herz, cœurs, corazones... In Russian, however, this suit is called черви or червы, from the adjective червонный, “red”.

More photos related to cards, heart, leaves and sea glass @ Shutterstock.