Card Symbols

Both the four suits — solid ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ and outlined ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧ — and every individual playing card from 🂡 the ace of spades to 🃞 the king of clubs. Click a card or a suit to take it; in bridge and most trick-taking games the suit ranking runs ♠ highest, then ♥, ♦ and ♣.

Copy and Paste Card Symbols

This page holds two different things. Eight of the 69 characters are the four suits, once solid and once outlined, and they behave like letters — your font draws them, your text colour fills them. The rest is an entire deck: fifty-six numbered and court cards, three jokers and a face-down back, each one a single character rather than a picture file. Click whichever kind the job needs.

What Are Card Symbols?

Card symbols are Unicode text characters covering the four French suits — spade, heart, diamond and club — plus the individual cards of the deck built from them. The suits sit at U+2660 to U+2667 and have been in the standard since 1993; the deck came much later, at U+1F0A0 to U+1F0DF, and is the reason a whole hand of cards can be written in plain text.

Other card systems are not here, and not through oversight. German suits are acorns, leaves, hearts and bells; Spanish suits are cups, coins, clubs and swords; Italian and Swiss decks differ again. Unicode encodes none of them as characters, so there is nothing to copy for those from anywhere.

How to Use Card Symbols

Copying Card Symbols

Click any character in the grid and it lands on your clipboard bare, with nothing wrapped around it.

Pasting Card Symbols Into Apps

Ctrl+V on Windows and Linux, Cmd+V on Mac, long-press and Paste on a phone. They go wherever text goes — a display name, a spreadsheet cell recording a hand, a message, a document.

Card Symbols and Their Colour

All eight suit characters take your text colour by default, so a solid ♥ prints black in a black-and-white document rather than red. Some platforms give ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ an emoji-style colour treatment because those four carry the emoji property, while ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧ never do. If red and black have to be reliable, set the colour yourself rather than trusting the character to bring it.

Types of Card Symbols

The Four Suit Card Symbols

♠ spade, ♥ heart, ♦ diamond, ♣ club. In bridge and most trick-taking games the suits rank in that order, spades highest and clubs lowest, which is also the order they are conventionally listed in. It is worth knowing before writing them out, because a hand given as ♣ ♦ ♥ ♠ reads as backwards to anyone who plays.

Outlined Card Symbols

♤ ♡ ♢ ♧ are the same four shapes drawn as outlines. Unicode calls them White Spade, White Heart and so on, where white means unfilled rather than a colour. They are the ones for a dark background, or when four suits in a row would otherwise be a solid black block.

Individual Playing Card Symbols

Every card exists as its own character, running ace to king in each suit: 🂡 to 🂮 for spades, 🂱 to 🂾 hearts, 🃁 to 🃎 diamonds, 🃑 to 🃞 clubs. That is fourteen per suit rather than thirteen, and the extra one is worth knowing about — see below.

Knight Card Symbols

Between the jack and the queen of every suit sits a knight: 🂬 🂼 🃌 🃜. No standard fifty-two-card deck contains one. The rank survives in tarot and in older European decks, and Unicode encoded the full historical set rather than just the modern one, which is why four suits of fourteen come to fifty-six and a normal deck comes to fifty-two.

Joker and Back Card Symbols

Three jokers, colour-coded by convention rather than by rendering: 🂿 red, 🃏 black and 🃟 white. 🂠 is a face-down card, which is what to reach for when a hand is hidden. 🎴 is separate from all of it — a pair of Japanese hanafuda cards, not a Western deck.

Best Uses for Card Symbols

Card Symbols in Names and Bios

A suit either side of a name is one character wide and inherits your colour, which is why ♠ and ♤ turn up in game handles far more often than any emoji does. Fields that strip emoji keep them.

Card Symbols in Game Notation

Bridge and poker writing uses the suit character in place of the word — ♠AK♥QJ is quicker to read than spelling it out. Where the exact card matters rather than the suit, the deck characters write a hand outright: 🂡🂮 is ace-king of spades in two characters, and it stays searchable text in a forum post or a spreadsheet.

Card Symbols in Documents and Spreadsheets

Because these are text, a column of suits or cards sorts, filters and searches like any other text. A picture of a spade does none of those things, which is the practical argument for the character in any file someone else will open.

Card Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The suit names are literal and paired: ♠ is U+2660 Black Spade Suit and ♤ is U+2664 White Spade Suit; ♥ U+2665 and ♡ U+2661; ♦ U+2666 and ♢ U+2662; ♣ U+2663 and ♧ U+2667. Black and white in those names mean filled and outlined. The deck runs in four blocks of sixteen from U+1F0A1, so the ace of hearts is U+1F0B1 and the ace of clubs U+1F0D1 — each tile in the grid carries its own code.

The four solid suits have the shortest Alt codes on this site, because they were in the original PC character set: hold Alt and type 3 for ♥, 4 for ♦, 5 for ♣, 6 for ♠ on the numeric keypad. The outlined four need their decimal values — 9828, 9825, 9826, 9831. The deck characters have no Alt code of any length, because Alt codes stop well short of that part of Unicode; copying is the only route to those.

Frequently Asked Questions About Card Symbols

What order do the card suits go in?

Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs — ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣. That is the bridge ranking, spades high, and it is the order most card writing follows. Not every game uses it: in many, suits do not rank at all and only the card values matter.

Why does each suit have fourteen cards instead of thirteen?

Because Unicode included the knight, 🂬, which sits between the jack and the queen and is not part of a modern fifty-two-card deck. If you are writing out a normal deck, skip it — the other thirteen per suit are exactly what you want.

Is ♣ a club or a clover?

Both names have a basis. The English name is club, but the shape is a trefoil, and the French name for the suit is trèfle — clover. Unicode calls it Black Club Suit. For an actual clover rather than the card suit, the shamrock is on the flower symbols page.

What is the difference between ♦ and a geometric diamond?

They are separate characters that look similar at small sizes. ♦ is U+2666 Black Diamond Suit and belongs with the cards; the geometric black and white diamonds are U+25C6 and U+25C7 and live with the square symbols. Use the suit character in a card context — it sorts and searches alongside the other three.

Why do the individual cards look like tiny pictures?

Because they are drawn at the size of a character but carry the detail of a card. Support is also thinner than for the suits: the four suit shapes render essentially everywhere, while 🂡 and its neighbours can come out as an empty box in older apps and custom display fonts. Test the deck characters where you intend to use them; the suits need no such check.

How do I type a card symbol without copying it?

Alt+3 through Alt+6 on the Windows numeric keypad give you ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ — four of the shortest Alt codes there are. The individual cards have none, and no phone keyboard carries any of it, so copying is the practical route for everything else.

Are there symbols for German or Spanish card suits?

No. Unicode encodes the French suits only. Acorns, leaves and bells from a German deck, and cups, coins and swords from a Spanish one, have no characters of their own.

Related Collections for Card Symbols

♥ and ♡ appear again with the heart symbols, where they sit among forty hearts rather than four suits — the same characters read as affection rather than a suit. The geometric diamonds that ♦ is often confused with are on the square symbols page, and dice symbols cover the other half of a games table. Everything else is on the symbol collections index.