Playing Card Symbols: Meaning of ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ & How to Type Them

The four playing card symbols ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ — spade, heart, diamond, and club — are among the most recognizable icons in the world. They appear on every deck of cards, in countless games, and as keyboard characters you can type into documents and messages. But what does each symbol actually mean, what are they properly called, and how do you type them on a computer or phone? This guide explains the meaning and history of the deck-of-cards symbols and gives you the exact Unicode values, Windows alt codes, and HTML entities you need to type or copy each one.

The Four Playing Card Symbols at a Glance

Here are the four card symbols together with their names, the color they usually appear in, their Unicode code points, the Windows alt code, and the HTML entity used to display them on a web page.

What Are the Symbols in Playing Cards?

The symbols in a deck of playing cards are the four suit signs: the spade (♠), the heart (♥), the diamond (♦), and the club (♣). Every card in a standard 52-card deck carries one of these four symbols, repeated as small marks called pips, and the symbol tells you which of the four suits the card belongs to. Two of the symbols are printed in black (spade and club) and two in red (heart and diamond), giving the deck its characteristic two-color balance.

What Does Each Symbol Mean?

The Spade ♠

The spade is a black, leaf-shaped symbol with a small stem. Its name comes from the Italian "spada," meaning sword, and in many games the spade is the highest-ranking suit. The spade is often associated with intellect, action, and — through the heavily decorated Ace of Spades — with a certain mystique, since that card historically carried the tax stamp and the maker's mark.

The Heart ♥

The heart is a red symbol and the most universally understood of the four, carrying its everyday associations of love, emotion, and life. As a card suit, the heart gives its name to the game of Hearts and sits just below the spade in suits-ranking games. Its simple, symmetrical shape makes it instantly readable at any size.

The Diamond ♦

The diamond is the second red symbol, drawn as a rhombus standing on one point. It is often linked to wealth and material things, reflecting the suit's descent from the older suit of coins in Italian and Spanish decks. In suit-ranking games the diamond typically ranks third of the four.

The Club ♣

The club is a black, three-leaf clover or trefoil. Despite the English name "club," the symbol is a stylized plant rather than a weapon — a legacy of its origin in the suit of batons and the German acorn. The club is commonly the lowest-ranking suit in games that order the suits.

What Are the Card Symbols Called?

Collectively, the four marks are called the suit symbols or suit signs. The small repeated versions printed across the face of each numbered card — the marks you count to read a card's value — are called pips. So a five of hearts shows five heart pips, and a nine of clubs shows nine club pips. The large central symbol and the small indices in the corners identify the suit, while the pips both identify the suit and indicate the rank on number cards. "Pip" is the proper term whenever you mean the individual suit marks on a card.

The Origin of the Card Symbols

The spade-heart-diamond-club symbols are the French suit design, created in the 15th century. Earlier European decks used different signs — Italian and Spanish cards used cups, coins, swords, and batons, while German cards used hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns. French card makers simplified these into four bold, stencil-friendly shapes that were cheap to mass-produce, and that practical advantage carried the French symbols to nearly every corner of the globe. The modern spade descends from the German leaf and the club from the acorn, even though their English names were borrowed from the older sword and baton suits — which is why the names and the shapes do not obviously match.

Black and White Symbol Variants

Each card symbol exists in both a filled (black) and an outline (white) form as text characters: the solid ♠ and the open ♤ spade, the solid ♥ and open ♡ heart, the solid ♦ and open ♢ diamond, and the solid ♣ and open ♧ club. On a real deck, hearts and diamonds are printed in red and spades and clubs in black, but as typographic symbols all four default to your text color. The outline variants are handy when you want a lighter, decorative look or need to distinguish suits without relying on color.

How to Type Playing Card Symbols

You can type the card symbols on almost any device using a few different methods. Choose whichever fits your keyboard and software.

On Windows (Alt Codes)

Hold the Alt key and type the number on the numeric keypad, then release Alt. Alt + 6 produces the spade ♠, Alt + 3 the heart ♥, Alt + 4 the diamond ♦, and Alt + 5 the club ♣. These classic alt codes work in most Windows programs, though you need an actual numeric keypad (or the on-screen keyboard) for them to register.

On Mac

macOS does not use the same alt codes, but you can insert the symbols from the Character Viewer. Press Control + Command + Space to open the emoji and symbol picker, search for "spade," "heart," "diamond," or "club," and click the symbol to insert it. You can also paste the Unicode characters directly from the table above.

In HTML and Unicode

On a web page, use the named HTML entities ♠, ♥, ♦, and ♣, or the numeric entities ♠, ♥, ♦, and ♣. In any program that accepts Unicode input, the code points are U+2660 (spade), U+2665 (heart), U+2666 (diamond), and U+2663 (club). These render consistently across modern browsers and fonts.

Copy and Paste the Card Symbols

If you just want the symbols quickly, copy them straight from here: ♠ spade, ♥ heart, ♦ diamond, and ♣ club. The outline versions are ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧. Copying and pasting is often the fastest method on a phone or any keyboard without a numeric keypad, and the pasted characters will keep working in documents, spreadsheets, chat apps, and social media posts.

Card Symbols in Solitaire

In Solitaire, the suit symbols are doing constant work even if you rarely think about them. The foundations are organized by symbol — one pile each for spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs — and you win by completing all four. The alternating-color rule that drives tableau building is really a rule about symbol color: red symbols on black, black on red. You can watch all four symbols come together on our Klondike Solitaire game, and the symbols become even more central in Spider Solitaire, where you must gather a complete run in a single suit before it can be cleared.

The Symbols on the Number Cards

On the number cards — Ace through ten — the suit symbol is repeated as pips arranged in a fixed, symmetrical pattern. A two shows two pips, a five shows five (four in the corners and one in the center), and a ten shows ten in two columns. These layouts are standardized so that you can read a card's value at a glance, even partially hidden in a fanned hand. The Ace is the special case: instead of a single small pip in the corner pattern, it usually displays one large, central symbol, which is why the Ace of Spades in particular became a showcase for decorative artwork.

The corner of every card carries an index: the rank (A, 2 through 10, J, Q, K) printed above a small version of the suit symbol. This index appears in two opposite corners so the card is readable whichever way up you hold it. The combination of a large central symbol or pip pattern and the two corner indices is what lets players identify a card instantly, and it is a design that has barely changed in over a century.

The Symbols on the Court Cards

The court cards — Jack, Queen, and King — do not use pip patterns. Instead they show an illustrated figure, with the suit symbol placed beside the figure and repeated in the corner indices. Each court card belongs to one suit, so there is a King of spades, a King of hearts, a King of diamonds, and a King of clubs, and the same for Jacks and Queens. The figures are traditionally drawn as mirror images, top and bottom, so they too read correctly either way up. Although the artwork varies between deck designs, the suit symbol on each court card always tells you which of the four suits it belongs to.

Card Symbols in the Unicode Playing Card Block

Beyond the four suit symbols, Unicode actually encodes an entire deck of cards as individual characters. The Playing Cards block, starting at code point U+1F0A0, contains a distinct glyph for every card — the Ace of Spades, the Queen of Hearts, and so on — plus the jokers and the card backs. These full-card characters are far less commonly supported by everyday fonts than the four simple suit symbols, so they may appear as empty boxes in some apps, but they exist for typographers, game developers, and anyone who needs a true card glyph rather than just a suit sign. For most purposes, though, the four classic suit symbols are all you need, and they are supported almost everywhere.

Using Card Symbols in Documents and Spreadsheets

The suit symbols are handy well beyond card games. In word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you can insert them through the Insert Symbol or special-characters menu, or simply paste them in. In spreadsheets they make compact visual markers — for example, using a red heart or black spade to label categories in a column. Because they are standard text characters rather than images, they copy, resize, and recolor just like any other letter, and they keep working when you share the file. That versatility is a big part of why people search for how to type the card symbols in the first place.

Suit Symbols and Color

On a physical deck the color of each symbol is fixed: hearts and diamonds are red, spades and clubs are black. As typographic characters, however, all four symbols simply take on whatever color your text is, so a heart typed in a black document appears black unless you deliberately color it red. This is worth remembering when you use the symbols in design work — if the red and black distinction matters, you have to apply the color yourself. Some specialized card fonts and the full Unicode card glyphs handle color automatically, but the basic suit symbols do not carry color information of their own.

Why the Card Symbols Are So Recognizable

Few graphic symbols are as universally understood as the four card suits. Their power comes from a combination of extreme simplicity and centuries of repetition: each symbol is a single bold shape that reads clearly at any size, from a tiny corner index to a giant casino sign, and billions of decks have stamped them into shared visual memory. That recognizability is exactly why the symbols escaped the card table long ago — they turn up in fashion, logos, emoji, and design of every kind, often carrying a hint of luck, gaming, or fortune. The shapes were originally chosen because they were cheap to print, but their staying power comes from how instantly the eye reads them.

The Hidden Symbolism of the Four Symbols

Over the centuries, people have attached layers of meaning to the four card symbols, though most of these readings are folklore rather than documented design intent. A popular interpretation links the four suits to the four seasons, the thirteen cards in each suit to the thirteen weeks in a season, and the red and black colors to day and night. Another old tradition associates the suits with the social classes of medieval life — nobility, clergy, merchants, and peasants. These symbolic readings are charming and widely repeated, but the historical record suggests the French suits were adopted mainly for the practical reason that their simple shapes were easy and cheap to print.

Card Symbols in Everyday Culture

The four suit symbols escaped the card table long ago and now appear throughout everyday culture. The spade and the club turn up in logos, fashion, and tattoos; the heart is one of the most-used symbols in the world, far beyond cards; and the diamond lends its shape to countless designs. As emoji, all four are standard characters that people use in messages every day, often to signal luck, gaming, or a playful mood. This cultural reach is a testament to how well the original French designers did their job: shapes simple enough to print cheaply in the 15th century are still instantly legible on a phone screen today.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the symbols in playing cards?

The four playing card symbols are the spade (♠), heart (♥), diamond (♦), and club (♣). Each represents one of the four suits, with spades and clubs in black and hearts and diamonds in red.

What does the spade symbol mean in cards?

The spade (♠) is a black suit whose name comes from the Italian word for sword. It is often the highest-ranking suit, and the Ace of Spades is traditionally the deck's most decorated card because it once carried the tax stamp.

What does each symbol mean in a deck of cards?

The spade derives from the sword and leaf and often ranks highest; the heart represents emotion and gives its name to the game Hearts; the diamond descends from the suit of coins and suggests wealth; the club comes from the baton and acorn and usually ranks lowest.

What are the card game symbols called?

Collectively they are called suit symbols or suit signs. The small repeated marks printed on the face of each card are called pips, which is why a five of hearts shows five heart pips.

How do I type card suit symbols?

On Windows, hold Alt and type 6 (spade), 3 (heart), 4 (diamond), or 5 (club) on the numeric keypad. On Mac, use the Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space). In HTML use ♠, ♥, ♦, and ♣.

What are the Unicode values for the card symbols?

The Unicode code points are U+2660 for the spade, U+2665 for the heart, U+2666 for the diamond, and U+2663 for the club. Outline variants occupy the neighboring code points U+2661 through U+2667.