Card
nounA small piece of stiff paper or plastic used for playing games, sending messages, identifying a person, or making payments.
How to spell card
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce card
What does card mean?
- nounA small piece of stiff paper or plastic used for playing games, sending messages, identifying a person, or making payments.
- verbTo comb or tease out wool or other fibres to prepare them for spinning.
Card in a sentence
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noun
She slid her bank card into the machine to pay for the groceries.
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verb
The workers would card the raw wool before it could be spun into yarn.
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noun
He posted a birthday card to his sister a week early.
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verb
Old mills used heavy machines to card huge bales of fleece.
Where does card come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word travelled into English in the 1400s through Old French 'carte', which came from the Latin 'charta' and its Greek source 'khartes', both meaning a leaf of papyrus or a sheet of writing material. The earliest English uses referred to a playing card made of thick paper, and from there the meaning spread to any small rectangle of stiff paper or pasteboard, including greeting cards, postcards, business cards, and later plastic bank cards. The same 'charta' root also gave English 'chart', 'charter', and 'cartography', which is a useful reminder that the simple four-letter spelling hides a long paper-trail of related words. A quite separate verb 'to card', meaning to comb wool or flax, comes instead from Latin 'carere', 'to comb or tease out', but it settled into the identical English spelling. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed stable for centuries.
How the word is built
- card (single root from Latin charta: a leaf of papyrus or paper)
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