Spade

How to spell spade

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spade

What does spade mean?

1. nounA tool with a flat metal blade and a long handle, used for digging or turning over soil.
2. nounOne of the four suits in a standard deck of playing cards, marked with a black pointed symbol.

Spade in a sentence

• He pushed the spade into the heavy clay and lifted out a clod of earth.

• The card showed a single black spade in each corner.

• A sharp spade makes cutting through tree roots far easier.

• In bridge a single spade was enough to take the final trick.

Where does spade come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The digging-tool sense comes straight from the Old English spadu (also spaed), a native Germanic word for a flat-bladed implement used to turn over earth, and it has close cousins in Dutch spade and German Spaten. The deeper root traces back to a Greek word spathe, meaning a broad flat blade or paddle, which also fed the words 'spatula' and 'epaulette'. The playing-card sense arrived by a quite separate route: Italian card makers used spade, the plural of spada meaning 'sword', so the suit was originally pictured as blades, and English borrowed the name in the late 1500s while keeping the familiar tool spelling. Because the two meanings converged on the same four-letter form, the simple silent-e spelling stuck for both. The blunt practicality of the word survives in the old phrase about calling a spade a spade, recorded in English since the 1540s.

How the word is built

• spade (a single root word from Old English spadu, meaning a digging tool; no prefix or suffix)