Playing Card Nicknames: Face Cards

Nicknames. Almost everything of value has them. That goes for playing cards too. This series lists and explains many you have heard — and some you haven’t. So far we’ve looked at deuces through tens. Now we continue with the face cards.

Before going into the nicknames of individual face cards, let’s take a look at their history.

Court Cards

The deck of cards we all take for granted has a long history. What you look at in your local cardroom or online is neither standard nor did it always look that way. Different countries with their different languages have different looking decks. The most common in the Western world are the English and French decks.

The most interesting cards in the deck are the face cards, the jacks, queens, and kings. Face cards are also called coat cards, court cards, paints, pictures, picture cards, and Rembrandts. In both the English and French decks, the figure is duplicated in a continuous image from the middle of the card, so that each half looks the same viewed from top or bottom.

Coat card comes from coated, from the garments worn by the figures. The term was in use until the late 17th century, at which point the pronunciation was probably corrupted into court card. It was more likely a corruption of coat card than an allusion to where kings and queens (and knaves?) are found. The altered term has been in use since the late 17th century.

The terms paints, pictures, and picture cards came from the illustrations on the cards representing royalty, which were likely taken from paintings. Rembrandts, being the works of a painter, arose from that.

The French have been designing and manufacturing playing cards since at least the 15th century, when they assigned to each of the court cards names taken from history or mythology. These designs appear often somewhat different from those in the English deck. In the French deck, the face cards had specific meaning, whereas in the English deck, card historians generally accept that they do not. Some confusion lies in the fact that the suits of the English deck came from the French deck.

The cards used by the English — and later, North Americans — were probably based on the designs of the French deck. The graphics of the English deck appear often somewhat different in design. To repeat, the face cards of the English deck probably do not represent anyone in particular.

Following we present the members of the court. In the French deck, the indexes are V, for valet, the French word for jack; D, for dame, French for lady, and R, for roi, French for king. The index, as we have seen, is the letter or number designation for the card rank, usually found just above the symbol for the suit representation.

Here are some indexes from the English deck:

And here are some from the French deck:

Jacks

There is some speculation as to the origin of the word jack for the card. The card was originally termed a knave, usage that began in the 1500s. Court cards were patterned after royalty. A knave was a male servant of a king, or more generally, any male servant. Not till centuries later did the work come to connote a villain or disreputable person. A synonym of knave, considered somewhat vulgar or common, was jack. A similar meaning is still heard in the terms steeplejack and jack-of-all-trades.

Originally decks had the indexes A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9, 10, Kn, Q, K. Differentiating K and Kn led to confusion, particularly when cards were printed such that they could be fanned, that is, held in such a way that the only the holder could read them. Decks introduced in the 1900s solved the problem by calling knaves jacks.

Before we get into specific jacks, we see that jacks in general have lots of nicknames.
A jack can be called a boy, whose derivation is straightforward.

From the trick-taking game euchre comes the name bower for a jack. It derives from a 19th-century Alsatian game called juckerspiel, in which the two top trumps are Jucker, meaning “jack.” As we’ll see later, this word may also have influenced the choice of the term joker for the extra card introduced into American euchre in the 1860s to act as the “best bower,” or topmost trump; bower is from German Bauer, literally “farmer” but also meaning “jack.” Euchre is therefore the game for which the joker was invented — the joker being, in effect, a glorified jack.

A jack is sometimes called a fishhook. That name is sometimes also applied to a seven. The term comes from the literal resemblance of either a jack or seven to a fishhook. This is sometimes shortened to hook. At the showdown, if someone announces three hooks, he usually means three jacks.

Three jacks can be called Hart, Schaffner, and Marx. The name is that of a clothing store chain, but why it should mean three jacks is obscure, since none of the founders was named Jack. Probably it’s just three male names that naturally go together.

A jack can be called a jackal.

You’ll also hear Jack Jackson for a jack. This is often shortened to Jackson. In addition to the specific card, this term is often used in draw lowball to indicate a hand topped by a jack.

Similarly, Jackson and Jacksonville, Florida are also heard.

Because of the similarity in sound, Jake is used.

Other variants are jaybird, jayboy, J-bird, J-boy, John, and Johnny.

A jack is also called a valet, from French. The origin is probably from the old meaning of a young man of noble birth serving a lord. Thus, in the deck of cards the valet is subservient to the “true” royalty, the kings and queens. ♠

Michael Wiesenberg has been a columnist for Card Player since 1988. He has written or edited many books about poker, and has also written extensively about computers, computer languages, and puzzles. Wiesenberg constructs crosswords for newspapers, magazines, books, and websites. Send bouquets, brickbats, and beseechments to [email protected].