Spades

How to spell spades

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spades

What does spades mean?

1. nounBroad-bladed hand tools used for digging or turning soil.
2. nounThe black suit of playing cards marked with a pointed leaf symbol, or the cards of that suit.

Spades in a sentence

• The volunteers brought their own spades to clear the allotment.

• She held three spades and a single heart in her hand.

• Two spades leaned against the shed wall after the planting.

• In bridge, spades outrank hearts as the highest suit.

Where does spades come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English spadu or spada, a broad-bladed tool used for digging, which sits among a family of related Germanic words such as Dutch spade and German Spaten. Behind those lies a Proto-Germanic root tied to the idea of a flat, broad blade, and scholars connect it ultimately to a Greek word spathe meaning a broad blade or flat piece of wood, the same source that eventually gave English 'spatula'. The plural simply adds -s to the everyday tool. The playing-card sense arrived by a separate route in the 1500s: it borrowed the Italian spade or Spanish espadas, meaning 'swords', because early Italian and Spanish cards depicted swords as one of the suits. English speakers kept the familiar spelling of the digging tool even though the card meaning came from 'sword', which is why one short word now covers both ideas.

How the word is built

• spade (Old English spadu: a digging tool)
• -s (plural)