Tarot Glossary
Tarot's vocabulary, explained plainly — no mystification, no gatekeeping. Every term links onward into the cards, spreads, and lessons where it lives.
Major Arcana
The 22 numbered trump cards of the tarot deck — The Fool through The World — carrying the deck's big, identity-level themes.
Minor Arcana
The 56 suit cards of the tarot deck — four suits of Ace to Ten plus four court cards — describing the textures of daily life.
The Four Suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles)
The Minor Arcana's four families, each paired with an element and a domain of life: fire/drive, water/feeling, air/thought, earth/matter.
Court Cards
The sixteen 'people' of the deck — Page, Knight, Queen, and King of each suit — best read as four roles crossed with the four suit energies.
Reversals (Reversed Cards)
Cards that appear upside down in a reading — traditionally read as the upright energy turned inward, blocked, or overdone.
The Fool's Journey
The reading of the 22 Major Arcana as one story in sequence — The Fool's passage through worldly lessons, inner reckonings, and deep transformation.
Spread
A defined layout of positions for a tarot reading, where each position asks a specific question of the card that lands in it.
Querent
The person asking the question in a tarot reading — from the Latin quaerere, 'to seek'. When you read for yourself, you are both reader and querent.
Significator
A card deliberately chosen (not drawn) to represent the querent or the matter at hand, placed before the spread is dealt.
Clarifier Card
An extra card drawn to illuminate a confusing card or position in a spread — useful sparingly, dangerous as a habit.
Jumper Card
A card that falls or 'jumps' out of the deck while shuffling — treated by many readers as a card that asked to be noticed.
Rider–Waite–Smith (RWS)
The 1909 deck by Pamela Colman Smith and A. E. Waite — the most influential tarot deck ever published and the visual language most guides (including ours) describe.
Pip Cards
The numbered Ace-to-Ten cards of the Minor Arcana — historically shown as bare suit-symbol arrangements before the RWS deck illustrated them with scenes.
Yes/No Tarot
The practice of asking tarot binary yes-or-no questions — popular, limited, and best used as a doorway to better questions.
Tarot vs. Oracle Cards
Tarot is a fixed 78-card system with shared structure; oracle decks are free-form card sets with no standard count, structure, or meanings.
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