Tarot Vocabulary

I try to make my writing accessible and clear even to those who aren't familiar with tarot. Even so, I will likely forget to define tarot-specific words each time I use them (which might become tiresome for readers, anyway!) So here's a quick-and-dirty tarot dictionary.  Let me know what I should add!

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Court cards: In playing cards, this refers to the jack, queen, and king.  In tarot, there are four court cards in each suit.  From lowest to highest rank, they are the page (sometimes princess), the knight (sometimes prince), the queen, and the king. I personally read my decks with the queen outranking the king.

Little White Book (LWB): A guide written to accompany a tarot deck, usually available with the purchase of the deck. Not always little, white, or even a book.

Major Arcana: The tarot cards that do not belong to a particular suit; rather, they represent specific unique characters or items, like the Star, the Hermit, Death, the Tower, or the Lovers.  They take on special prominence in spreads, and in the original game-playing use of tarot, they outranked suited cards.

Minor Arcana: Made up of four suits, numbered similarly to traditional playing cards (ace through ten plus court cards).

Pips: Easily-countable symbols, in the style of traditional playing cards (there are three pips on a three of clubs, for example).

Reversals:  When a card appears upside-down in a spread.

Suits: The grouping of the Minor Arcana by cups, pentacles, wands, and swords.  These names are not perfectly consistent; cups are sometimes called chalices, pentacles can be discs or coins, and wands are sometimes staves.  Non-traditional tarot decks may employ different, idiosyncratic suits, but almost every tarot deck will be limited to four.

Trumps: See Major Arcana.

Querent: The person asking the question to be answered by the cards (may be the person reading the cards, or the person you are reading them for).