Tarot glossary

The words the rest of this site uses without stopping to define them, defined. Grouped by what you are confused about rather than alphabetically, because you cannot look up a word you do not have yet.

35 terms

The deck itself

Tarot: A deck of 78 cards used for reflection and, historically, for card games. The divinatory use is younger than the deck: tarot appeared in fifteenth-century Italy as a trick-taking game, and reading it for insight is an eighteenth-century French addition that later spread through English occult societies. Covered in Learning tarot
Arcana (also arcanum): Latin for "secrets", and the word that splits the deck in two. The 22 Major Arcana are the named, numbered cards from The Fool to The World; the 56 Minor Arcana are the four suits. A single card is an arcanum, though almost nobody says it. Covered in Major and Minor Arcana
Major Arcana (also trumps): The 22 cards that sit outside the suits, numbered 0 to 21. They describe forces and turning points rather than areas of life, and a reading heavy with them is usually about something structural. In the card game they were the trump suit, which is where the alternative name comes from. Covered in Major and Minor Arcana The Fool
Minor Arcana: The 56 suited cards: four suits of fourteen, Ace through Ten plus four court cards. They describe the texture of ordinary life — effort, feeling, thought and material circumstance — where the Major Arcana describes its turning points. Covered in The numbers, Ace to Ten
Suit (also Rods, Batons, Chalices, Coins, Discs): One of the four families of the Minor Arcana: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, conventionally mapped to fire, water, air and earth. The suit tells you which department of life a card is talking about before you know anything else about the card. Covered in What the four suits mean
Court cards: The Page, Knight, Queen and King of each suit — sixteen cards that read as people, or as postures a person can take, rather than as events. They are the part of the deck readers find hardest, because a card that is a person can be you, someone else, or a way of behaving. Covered in The court cards
Pip cards (also numbered cards): The forty numbered Minor Arcana, Ace through Ten. In older decks the pips were literally that — four cups, four cups drawn on a card, with no scene. Rider-Waite-Smith illustrated all forty, which is the single change that made the deck readable without memorising a table. Covered in The numbers, Ace to Ten
Rider-Waite-Smith (also RWS, Rider-Waite): The 1909 deck this site uses, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to Arthur Edward Waite's direction and published by William Rider & Son. It is the most widely copied tarot deck in existence, and the reason most modern decks look broadly alike. The plates are in the public domain. Covered in About Tarotez
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: Waite's 1911 companion book to the deck, giving a short reading for every card upright and reversed. It is the source most modern meanings descend from, including the ones on this site, and it is worth knowing that the tradition has a written origin rather than being folklore.
Tarot de Marseille: The older French pattern, standardised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose pip cards are unillustrated. Readers of Marseille work from suit and number rather than from a scene, which is a different craft — and why a Marseille reading of the Five of Cups will not mention a spilled cup.
Oracle deck: Any divination deck that is not a tarot: no fixed count, no suits, no shared structure, and every deck its own system. Oracle cards are not "easier tarot" — they are a different object, and a spread designed for 78 structured cards does not transfer to them.
Lenormand: A 36-card system named after a nineteenth-century French fortune-teller, read in combinations rather than card by card. It is often shelved beside tarot and shares almost nothing with it mechanically, which is why a tarot meaning applied to a Lenormand card produces nonsense.

Doing a reading

Spread (also layout): The arrangement of cards, where each place has a fixed meaning agreed before anything is drawn. A spread is what makes a set of cards into a reading: the same three cards in different positions say different things, because the position supplies the question each card is answering. Covered in Choosing a spread
Position: One place in a spread, and the question it stands for — "what is behind this", "what you are not seeing". Reading a card without its position is the most common way to get a spread wrong, because it turns a structured answer back into a pile of pictures. Covered in The Celtic Cross positions
Celtic Cross: The best-known spread in English-language tarot: ten cards in a cross and a staff, popularised by Waite in 1911. It is thorough and it is not a beginner's spread — ten positions is a lot of structure to hold, and most questions are better served by three cards. Covered in Celtic Cross reading
One-card draw: A single card, usually for a single question or for the day. It is the spread with nowhere to hide: there is no structure to lean on and no narrative to build, so what you get is the image and your own reaction to it. Covered in A daily card practice
Querent: The person the reading is for — from the Latin for "one who seeks". When you read for yourself you are both reader and querent, which is the situation this site is built for and the one with the most obvious conflict of interest. Covered in Reading for yourself
Significator: A card chosen in advance to stand for the querent or the subject, traditionally a court card matched to their appearance or temperament. Most modern readers skip it: it spends a card on something you already know, and the appearance-matching it was built on has not aged well.
Clarifier: An extra card drawn to explain one that did not land. Used sparingly it is legitimate; used repeatedly it becomes redrawing until the answer is comfortable, which is the failure mode that makes a reading unable to tell you anything at all. Covered in Asking the same question twice
Shuffle and cut: Randomising the deck, and dividing it before dealing. The ritual matters more than the method: it marks the boundary between deciding what to ask and finding out. This site shuffles with Fisher-Yates, which is uniform, rather than an animation that only looks random.
Reversal (also reversed card): A card that arrives upside down, read as a change of direction, intensity or timing rather than as the plain opposite of its upright meaning. Reading reversals is optional — many experienced readers do not — and adding them before you know the upright deck doubles the vocabulary too early. Covered in Reversed cards
Upright: A card the right way up, and the meaning most people mean when they name a card without qualifying it. Every card page on this site gives the upright reading first, because a reversal is a modification of it rather than an independent card.
Yes/no reading: A spread built to return a verdict rather than a description. It is the most popular thing to ask a deck and the thing it does least well, because a card is a picture and a verdict is a conclusion somebody has to draw from it — usually you. Covered in Yes or no reading
Card combination: Two or more cards read together, where the pair says something neither says alone. This is where a reading stops being a list, and it is also where invention creeps in most easily, since any two images can be made to tell a story if you want one badly enough. Covered in Card combinations

Ideas you will meet

Cartomancy: Divination with cards of any kind, tarot included. The word is older than the tarot's divinatory use and covers ordinary playing cards too, which is worth knowing because much early tarot reading was borrowed wholesale from playing-card practice.
Divination: Seeking knowledge by interpreting signs. It is the traditional frame for tarot and it is not the frame this site uses: nothing here forecasts events, and the readings are written to be read as a mirror held at a question rather than as information about the future. Covered in Reflection, not prediction
Intuition: In tarot, the reader's own reaction to an image, used as part of the reading rather than suppressed in favour of a book meaning. It is real and it is not magic: what you notice first in a picture is information about what you brought to it.
Symbolism: The deliberate visual vocabulary of a deck — colours, postures, objects, the number of blades in a back. In Rider-Waite-Smith almost nothing is decorative, which is why reading the picture before reaching for the meaning usually works better than the reverse.
Elemental dignity: A method that strengthens or weakens a card according to the elements of its neighbours — fire beside air amplifies, fire beside water dampens. It comes out of the Golden Dawn, it is systematic, and it is entirely optional; nothing on this site uses it.
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: The late-Victorian occult society whose members included Waite, and whose teaching shaped the correspondences most modern readers inherit without knowing the source — the suit-to-element mapping, the astrological attributions, and much of the structure behind the Major Arcana.
Numerology in tarot: Reading the number on a card as a stage in a sequence: Aces begin, Fives break, Tens finish. In this deck it is structural rather than mystical — the Minor Arcana was designed and illustrated that way in 1909 — which is why the pattern is useful and does not require believing anything about numbers. Covered in The numbers, Ace to Ten
Timing: Any method for getting a date out of a spread. There are at least four traditional systems and they contradict each other flatly, which is the clearest available evidence that none is measuring anything. What the cards do hold is pace, and what they answer well is what has to happen first. Covered in Tarot and timing
Card of the day: One card drawn each morning as a practice rather than a forecast. It works when it is read backwards — checked against the day once the day has happened — and stops working the moment it is used to decide what the day is going to be. Covered in Card of the day
Reading for others: Reading with someone else present, which changes the job: you are now responsible for what a person hears about their own life. The practical rules are the boring ones — do not diagnose, do not predict deaths, and do not say anything you would not want said to you.
Open reading: A reading with no question, taken as a general look at where someone is. It is harder rather than easier: without a question there is nothing for the cards to be about, so an open reading tends to become whatever the reader is already inclined to say. Covered in How to ask tarot questions