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Check out the tarot dictionary if you are confused about tarot terms. Significator, archetype, reversals, querent, arcana, are you getting lost in tarot lingo? Find a definition of these words in our basic tarot dictionary.
Tarot Dictionary - Common Terms in Alphabetical Order
Archetypes
In Jungian psychology, archetypes are defined as a primitive mental image inherited from our ancestors and shared in the collective unconscious.
Cartomancy
Using cards for fortune-telling. The cards used for fortune-telling can be of any kind: tarot, playing cards, angel cards.
Court Cards
The pages, knights, queens, and kings of a tarot deck. They often represent people or aspects of a personality.
A controversial member of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. He designed the Thoth tarot with the help of artist Frieda Harris.
Cups
The tarot suits related to emotions, intuition, and creativity.
Divination
The practice of seeking knowledge of future events. Understanding the present helps predict the possible outcomes.
Esoteric
Intended to be understood by a limited number of people with specialized knowledge.
Intuition
The ability to understand something immediately, without conscious reasoning.
Layout
Cards arranged in a predetermined pattern for a tarot reading. The nature of the question defines the appropriate layout.
Marseille, Tarot de
The most popular tarot deck, originally produced in the Marseille area and still used for playing.
Major Arcana
The twenty-two trump cards are typical of the tarot deck. They represent main events and archetypal energies at work.
Minor Arcana
The fifty-six tarot cards are divided into four suits. They describe situations of everyday life.
Pentacles
One of the four suits of the tarot deck, corresponding in other decks to the coins. This suit is associated with the material world, money, and resources.
Pip Cards
Numerical cards that go in the tarot deck from one to ten.
Querent
Whoever is asking a question to the tarot cards.
Question
Formulate the appropriate question to receive a satisfying answer.
Reading
The act of interpreting the card symbols.
Reader
Someone who interprets the tarot symbols. With intuition and a little practice, anyone can be a tarot reader.
Cards that show upside down in a spread. Some readers give them a special meaning and some don’t.
Rider Waite
The most popular of the illustrated tarot decks. First published in 1909 by Rider. Illustrated by artist Pamela Coleman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite.
A card that represents the querent in a tarot layout. It can be chosen or picked randomly.
Spread
The pattern in which the tarot cards are arranged for reading.
Suit
A set of cards distinguished by the same pictorial symbols. In the tarot deck, the suits are cups, wands, swords, and pentacles.
Symbol
Something that represents something else, often a material object that stands for an abstract concept and embodies its essence.
Synchronicity
A coincidence of various events that appear to be meaningfully related.
Swords
The suit is related to the intellect, challenges, and rational mind.
Trumps
A card suit that ranks above the others, in the tarot deck the Major Arcana is the trumps.
Waite, Arthur Edward
Member of the Golden Dawn, creator of the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck-
Wands
A stick or a club as in the suit of wands. This symbol is related to inspiration, projects, activity.
