Tarot

How to spell tarot

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tarot

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tarot mean?

1. nounA set of picture cards used for fortune telling and, historically, for a card game.

Tarot in a sentence

• She shuffled the tarot deck before the reading began.

• A friend offered to read his tarot cards at the party.

Where does tarot come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the late 1500s from the French tarot, which itself was taken from the Italian tarocco, the plural being tarocchi, the name of a card game played in Italy from the 1400s. The original meaning was simply the special trump cards used in that game, and only much later, especially in the 1700s and 1800s, did the cards become associated with fortune telling and the occult. The Italian tarocco is of genuinely uncertain origin; etymologists have not settled on a convincing source, and some have proposed links to Arabic or to older Italian dialect words for foolishness, but none is proven. The spelling kept its French shape, which is why the final t stays silent in English, the trap being that the word sounds like it ends in an open vowel even though it is written with that mute t. It is worth remembering that tarot entered Europe as ordinary playing cards long before anyone read fortunes with them.

How the word is built

• tarot (single root; no prefix or suffix, borrowed whole from French tarot)