Traditionally, Western playing cards are made of rectangular layers of paper or thin cardboard pasted together to form a flat, semirigid material. They are uniform in shape and size and small enough for several to be held together in one hand, frequently fanned out so that the identifying marks on each card can be seen. One side of each card—its front, or face—is marked so as to render it identifiable and distinguishable from its fellows, while the back, or reverse, is either blank or bears a pattern common to all. The corners are usually slightly rounded to prevent fraying. In the second half of the 20th century, it became common to add a plastic coating to resist wear and even to produce all-plastic cards.

Card games typically exploit the fact that each player can identify only the cards he holds, not those of his opponents. This same characteristic also applies to dominoes (domino) and to the gaming tiles of mah-jongg. In fact, British domino players often call dominoes “cards,” mah-jongg may itself be the ancestor of card games of the rummy family, and in China there is no clear-cut dividing line between cards and dominoes, the latter being made of lacquered paper.

The earliest reference to playing cards or dominoes—the same word designates both—occurs in Chinese literature of the 10th century, but with no indication of their markings or the games played with them.

Playing cards first appeared in Europe in the 1370s, probably in Italy or Spain and certainly as imports or possessions of merchants from the Islamic Mamlūk dynasty centred in Egypt. Like their originals, the first European cards were hand-painted, making them luxury goods for the rich. The account book of King Charles VI of France (now lost) is said to have noted a payment of 56 sols parisiens to Jacquemin Gringonneur for painting a deck of cards “pour le divertissement du roy” (“for the amusement of the king”). Cards gradually spread along the inland European trade routes during the 15th century as a favoured pastime of the upper classes.

The German invention of wood-block printing in the early 15th century significantly reduced the cost of production, which was further reduced in France in the 1480s by painting through stencils (stenciling), a practice resulting in the distinctively simplified design of suitmarks technically designated French but now generally called international because of their worldwide popularity: pique, coeur, carreau, trèfle—known in English as spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs—which are symbolized below.

Cost reductions further expanded the social appeal of card games and enhanced their inherent advantages over traditional indoor games. In particular, cards lent themselves to the development of games suitable for different numbers of players—hitherto the choice was between two-player board games like chess and multiplayer gambling games played with dice—and for different mentalities and temperaments, from unskilled dicelike gambling games to the more refined and intellectually demanding trick-taking games—albeit still played for money; the practice of playing games of skill strictly for fun is historically recent. Crucially, playing cards held more appeal for women, and associations between card play and seduction became widespread throughout European literature and painting. This factor, together with the proliferation of gambling card games, resulted in frequent denunciations of card playing by church authorities and prohibitions of specific games by civic authorities.

Despite advances in printing and manufacture and the never-diminishing popularity of games, playing-card manufacture remains a highly specialized and competitive market. In the 20th century many traditional suppliers went out of business or were absorbed into larger companies.

The suitmarks of the international, or standard, deck indicate two black and two red suits—namely spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. The word spade probably represents the Old Spanish spado (“sword”), while club is a direct translation of basto, implying that Spanish suits were used in England before the French ones were invented (about 1490).

Ranks are indicated by numerals from 1 to 10 on “spot cards.” In addition, three court cards designated jack (formerly knave), queen, and king are notionally equivalent to 11, 12, and 13, respectively, though actually marked J, Q, and K.

In most Western card games, the numeral 1 is designated ace and marked A accordingly. In games based on the superiority of one rank over another, such as most trick-taking games, the ace counts highest, outranking even the king. In games based on numerical value, the ace normally counts 1, as in cribbage, or 11, as an option in blackjack. In games based on arranging cards into ordered series, such as rummy, it may count either high or low or even both (as in a “round-the-corner” sequence such as Q-K-A-2-3).

Standard decks normally contain two or more additional cards, designated jokers, each depicting a traditional court jester. Few games employ them, and those that do use them in different ways. In rummy games, such as canasta, they are “wild” and may be used to represent any desired “natural” card. The joker was originally invented (though not under that name) to serve as the highest trump in the game of euchre and is, in effect, a glorified jack. (It is not, as sometimes claimed, a descendant of the card designated the fool in tarot decks.)

Each system has its own court cards and range of numerals. The oldest court cards were all male. Among court cards, caballo and cavallo mean horse but, as they refer to the riders, are better termed cavaliers, while ober (over) and unter (under) are taken to mean, respectively, a superior and inferior officer, althouth they originally referred to the position of the suitmark. It has been often pointed out that Latin suitmarks and courts bear a military flavour, Germanic ones a rustic flavour, and Anglo-French ones a courtly flavour. Historically speaking, the international deck is the English national version of the French national deck. Incidentally, and contrary to popular belief, it was not the French who first replaced the upper viceroy with a queen but the Germans, who, however, subsequently reverted to the male upper viceroy.

The numerals are not complete in all traditions. Most French games are played with 32 cards (formerly 36) but Spanish and Italian with 40, sometimes 48, rarely 52. Most Spanish and Italian games omit the 10s, and Swiss cards replace the 10s with “banners.” In Spanish and Italian games an ace is merely a 1. The Swiss equivalent, though called an ace, is actually a 2, as it bears two suitmarks.

Three other design features deserve mention.

Card backs, originally plain, tended to acquire accidental (and sometimes deliberate) distinguishing marks. Card makers sought to render these less visible by printing a pattern of fine dots or a tartan design (described as taroté in French) on the backs of cards. Advances in colour printing and in printing registration in the 19th century led to the vast array of attractive designs now available.

The royal figures on court cards were originally depicted at full length, a fact recalled in cribbage by the phrases “one for his nob 【head】” and “two for his heels.” This had the disadvantage that observant players could identify courts in their opponents' hands by their natural practice of turning them “right way up.” It was overcome by the invention of double-headed courts in the 19th century, which soon spread to most regional patterns, though some continue to resist it.

Another 19th-century invention was the practice of indexing the rank and suit of each card in the top corner or corners, making it possible for players to identify their cards without having to spread them so widely as to risk exposure to opponents. The first such cards were called squeezers because they could be squeezed together in a tight fan. In English the initial K for knave would have been indistinguishable from K for king and was therefore replaced with J for jack. Originally this was the name applied to the knave of trump in the old game of all fours, which had already achieved wide popularity in preference to the archaic-sounding knave in other games. Sweden continues awkwardly to exhibit K for köning (king) and Kn for knabe (knave).

This survey by no means exhausts the variety of playing cards still used in Europe and America, let alone elsewhere in the world. Other noteworthy specialized cards include Jewish kvitlak cards, Scandinavian gnav cards, American rook cards, Chinese money- and domino-cards, and Japanese hanafuda (flower cards), and a host of modern propriety games are based on specialized cards, including trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering.