Tarot Terms Glossary: The Vocabulary of a Reading, Explained

Arcana simply means secrets or mysteries, and it is the word tarot uses for the deck's two halves. The Major Arcana is the group of twenty-two unsuited cards, numbered zero to twenty-one and given names such as The Fool, The Hermit, and The World. You will also see them called trumps, a leftover from the deck's origins as a card game. The Minor Arcana is the remaining fifty-six cards, divided into four suits.

Within each suit, the ten numbered cards from Ace to Ten are called pips. In older decks these show only repeated suit symbols, which is why Marseille-style decks are described as having non-scenic pips. The four remaining cards in each suit are the court cards, sometimes called the royals: usually Page, Knight, Queen, and King, though decks vary and you will meet Princesses, Princes, Daughters, and Knaves.

The four suits are Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles in the most common English naming. Wands appear elsewhere as Batons, Rods, or Staves, and Pentacles as Coins or Disks. When a card page mentions the Ace of Disks, it is the card you know as the Ace of Pentacles. The difference is deck tradition rather than meaning.

The querent is the person the reading is for, the one asking. The word comes from the Latin for seeking, and it stays useful even when you read for yourself, because it names a role rather than a second person. Saying that the querent keeps returning to this can create just enough distance to see your own situation clearly.

The reader is whoever interprets the cards, and in reflective practice you are usually both. Some readers describe holding the two roles separately: first the querent asks honestly, then the reader describes what is on the table without softening it. It is a small discipline that improves readings noticeably.

A significator is a card chosen deliberately, before shuffling, to represent the querent or the subject of the question. Traditionally it is a court card matched to the person, though many contemporary readers choose any card that captures the situation, and plenty skip the practice entirely. Related is the birth card or soul card, a Major Arcana card derived from a date of birth. Treat those as reflective prompts rather than fixed identities, in the same spirit as everything else here.

A spread is a layout that assigns a job to each place a card will land. Those jobs are called positions, and a position is what turns a card into a statement. The Five of Cups means something different in a position about what you are grieving than in one about what supports you. Common spreads include the one-card daily draw, the three-card spread for situation, obstacle, and next step, and the ten-card Celtic Cross, which is thorough and often far too much for a beginner.

A clarifier, or clarifying card, is an extra card drawn to expand on one that will not resolve. Used sparingly it genuinely helps. Used repeatedly it becomes a way of shuffling until the deck agrees with you, so most readers set a limit before starting. A jumper is a card that falls out of the deck while shuffling. Some readers treat it as significant and others put it back, and neither choice is wrong as long as you decide beforehand.

Cutting means dividing the deck before you draw, often into three piles. Face-down and face-up readings differ in whether you reveal each card as you place it or lay the whole spread first, which changes how much the later cards colour your reading of the earlier ones.

An upright card faces you the right way up. A reversed card arrives upside down. Reading reversals is a choice rather than a rule. Readers who use them generally treat a reversal as the same energy turned inward, blocked, delayed, excessive, or only just beginning, rather than as a simple opposite. The Sun reversed is not misery. It points toward warmth you are having trouble letting in.

Dignity is the older idea that a card's meaning shifts depending on its neighbours. Elemental dignities, common in systems descended from the Golden Dawn, judge whether the elements of adjacent cards strengthen, weaken, or complicate one another: fire and air support each other, while water and fire interfere. You do not need this system to read well, but it explains why experienced readers keep insisting that a card means little in isolation.

Other terms describe pattern rather than single cards. A repeating number across a spread, three Fours for instance, is usually read as emphasis. A suit that is entirely absent is worth naming out loud. A spread with unusually many Major Arcana cards is often called Major-heavy, and taken as a sign the question sits at the level of themes rather than tasks.

RWS stands for Rider-Waite-Smith, the deck published in 1909 with images drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to Arthur Edward Waite's direction and issued by the Rider company. Its defining innovation was giving every Minor Arcana card a full illustrated scene, which is why it became the standard teaching deck and why most card meanings you find online describe its imagery. Smith's name was left off the credit for decades. Including it is now normal and correct.

Marseille refers to a family of older French decks with non-scenic pips, read through number and suit rather than narrative pictures. Thoth is the deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris, dense with astrological and kabbalistic detail. Each tradition carries its own vocabulary, and meanings do not transfer perfectly between them.

Correspondences are the links tarot draws to other symbolic systems: elements for the suits, planets and zodiac signs for the Major Arcana, numerology for the pips, and in some schools the Hebrew alphabet and the Tree of Life. They are tools for thinking rather than facts to defend. If a correspondence helps a card open up for you, keep it. If it turns reading into homework, set it down without guilt.

Cartomancy is the general word for reading with cards, of which tarot is one branch. Oracle decks, Lenormand, and playing-card reading are others. An oracle deck is any deck with its own structure rather than tarot's seventy-eight-card architecture, which is why oracle cards cannot be looked up in a tarot reference. The LWB, or little white book, is the small booklet that ships with a deck: useful for the creator's intentions, rarely enough on its own.

Cleansing describes any ritual for resetting a deck between readings, whether that is knocking on the pile, shuffling thoroughly, leaving the cards in moonlight, or simply putting them away with attention. There is no obligation here. It works mainly as a transition marker for the reader, and after a heavy reading that alone is worth something.

A daily draw is one card pulled each morning as practice. A reading journal is where you record the date, the question, the cards, your first impressions, and later what you noticed. A deck interview is a spread some readers use with a new deck, asking what it is good at. Grounding means the small practical steps, such as breath, water, or a walk, that return you to ordinary life afterwards.