Spades

8 of spades

Spades or also French Pique or English Spades or (four-color hand) is a playing card suit in the French hand . Symbolically, it is an upside down , black heart with a stem at the bottom.

Spades symbolize a pike or a horse-dealer or a halberd . The card color is Schuufle ( shovel ) in Switzerland and in some German areas, e.g. B. in the Rhineland, called Schüppe / Schippe (shovel). In the German leaf it corresponds to foliage or green, leaf or shovel, called grass in Bavaria.

Spades are the second most valuable color in numerous trick-taking games , especially skat , and the most valuable color in bridge .

Word origin

The name comes from the French pique , which means spit or lance. The word for the mountain peak is not directly related to this ( see Piz ). In a saying , spades also stand for resentment.

Character encoding

The character ♠ is already included in the computer character set CP437 and thus also in the WGL4 . In Unicode a black ♠ and a white ♤ spades are defined:

character	Unicode	Entity in HTML
♠	U + 2660 BLACK SPADE SUIT	`♠` or `&spades;`
♤	U + 2664 WHITE SPADE SUIT	`♤`

supporting documents

Commons : spades (symbol) - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Commons : spades (color) - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Wiktionary: spades - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

^ "Symbols" In: Hugo Kastner, Gerald Kador Folkvord: The great Humboldt encyclopedia of card games (= Humboldt-Taschenbuch. Freizeit & Hobby. Volume 4058). Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2005, ISBN 3-89994-058-X , p. 20.

[Kastner_&_Folkvord_2005-1] "Symbols" In: Hugo Kastner, Gerald Kador Folkvord: The great Humboldt encyclopedia of card games (= Humboldt-Taschenbuch. Freizeit & Hobby. Volume 4058). Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2005, ISBN 3-89994-058-X , p. 20.