Tarot glossary
Tarot has its own working vocabulary, arcana, suit, spread, and the terms below cover the ones you'll meet most often, defined plainly and without the jargon that usually surrounds them.
What do "Major" and "Minor Arcana" mean?
They're the deck's two halves. The Major Arcana is 22 named, numbered cards, The Fool through The World, each standing for a large theme like change, love, or loss. The Minor Arcana is the other 56 cards, closer to a diary of daily life: routines, small decisions, passing moods. When a Major Arcana card turns up in a reading, it usually marks something with real weight. When it's Minor Arcana throughout, the reading is likely about the texture of an ordinary week. Both halves together make up the 78-card deck. For the full list of Major cards and what each one means, see the Major Arcana guide.
What is a suit, and what are pip and court cards?
A suit is one of the four families that make up the Minor Arcana: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, each tied to a different slice of life (drive, feeling, thought, and material matters, respectively). Within each suit, the numbered cards, Ace through Ten, are called pip cards or "number cards," and they carry a shared numerology across all four suits: every Three, for instance, touches on growth or a first result, whichever suit it lands in. The remaining four cards in each suit, Page, Knight, Queen, King, are court cards, usually read as a person, a role you're playing, or a way of approaching something. The suits guide, court cards guide, and numerology guide each go deeper into one of these threads.
What do "querent," "upright," and "reversed" mean?
The querent is simply the person a reading is for, you or whoever you're reading for. A card dealt right side up is read upright, at its full, plain meaning. A card that lands upside down relative to the querent is reversed, and that usually softens, blocks, or turns the upright meaning inward rather than flipping it into an opposite. Reversals are optional, not a requirement of a "correct" reading; plenty of readers work upright only. The reversals guide walks through the four common ways a reversal shifts a card's meaning.
What are a spread and a significator?
A spread is the layout you deal cards into, a fixed set of positions where each spot asks its own question ("past," "what's blocking you," "likely outcome"). A three-card spread and a Celtic Cross are both spreads; the difference is how many positions they use and what each one is asking. A significator is an older practice: a card chosen before the shuffle to stand in for the querent or the situation, then set aside or placed at the center of the spread as an anchor. Most readers today skip this step, but you'll still see it in classic spread instructions. Browse working layouts in the spreads guide.
What are elemental dignities and the Fool's Journey?
Elemental dignities is a technique for reading how neighboring cards support or clash with each other, based on the classical elements each suit carries (Wands as fire, Cups as water, Swords as air, Pentacles as earth); a fire card next to a water card, for example, is read as tension rather than agreement. It's an advanced layer, not something you need for a first reading. The Fool's Journey is a different idea entirely: reading the 22 Major Arcana in sequence as one continuous story, from the open-eyed beginning of The Fool to the completion of The World, with each card marking a stage a person moves through over time.
Where does the word "tarot" come from, and what is cartomancy?
Tarot began as "tarocchi," a card game played in 15th-century Italy, decades before anyone used it for reflection or insight. Cartomancy is the broader practice this later became part of: reading any deck of cards for meaning, tarot being the most developed and best-known branch. The visual style most modern decks share traces back to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (RWS), illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909, which was the first widely printed deck to give every Minor Arcana card its own detailed scene instead of plain repeated suit symbols. That's why so many decks still borrow its visual language even today.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a term like 'reading' and a 'spread'?
A spread is the layout, the fixed set of positions you deal cards into. A reading is the whole session: shuffling, dealing the spread, and interpreting what lands. Every reading uses a spread, but the spread itself is just the map.
Do I need to learn every term before I start reading?
No. Arcana, suit, and upright versus reversed cover most of what you'll see in your first sessions. The rest (elemental dignities, significators, cartomancy history) is worth knowing but not worth memorizing before you deal a single card.
Is 'querent' still a word people actually use?
Yes, especially in books and on card sites, though plenty of modern readers just say 'the person asking' or 'you.' Auspice uses both. If you see querent elsewhere, it means the person the reading is for, nothing more mysterious than that.
Why do tarot terms sound so old-fashioned?
Because the deck's core vocabulary (arcana, court, pip) dates to when tarot was a 15th-century card game, before it picked up divinatory use in the 1700s. The language stuck even as the practice changed, so a lot of terms carry more history than mystery.
What tarot term do beginners misunderstand most often?
Reversed. New readers often read it as 'the opposite meaning' or 'something bad,' when it's closer to a volume knob: the same theme, turned down, turned inward, or stuck. See the reversals guide below for the full breakdown.