Man, I swear, sometimes the simplest things are the ones that drive you absolutely nuts. I was knee-deep in trying to refactor some ancient, awful SQL procedures—you know the kind, nested joins going back to the stone age—and I was just finally getting into the zone. The coffee was hot, the keyboard was clicking, and I was about to drop the hammer on a routine that had been causing latency spikes for weeks.
Then my wife, Sarah, strolls in. She was supposed to be enjoying her quiet Saturday morning, sipping tea and tackling the weekend newspaper crossword. But she was frowning, clutching her pen like a weapon.
“Hey,” she starts, quiet, but with that tone that tells you a small problem is about to become your huge problem. “I need you to look at this.”
I swear I sighed so hard my desk lamp flickered. I pushed my chair back and reluctantly dragged my eyes from the glowing terminal where twenty lines of code were screaming for mercy.
She shoved the newspaper under my nose. The clue was circled: “Major suit in a deck of 78 cards (6 letters).”
“It’s not ‘Swords’ or ‘Wands,’ too short. It’s not ‘Pentacles,’ too long. I tried ‘Trumps’ but that doesn’t fit the letters I have already,” she rattled off, clearly exasperated. “I’m stuck. This stupid thing is holding up the entire corner of the puzzle.”
I instantly felt that familiar spike of frustration. I’d been wrestling with server architecture all morning, only to be yanked out of the matrix by an esoteric vocabulary check. But if I didn’t solve it, she’d bug me for the next hour, so I grabbed my phone and started digging. I wasn’t just going to search for the suits; I needed to understand why the crossword writers make these choices and why the names are so variable.
The Unexpected Rabbit Hole: Unearthing the Variants
I started with a basic search, just verifying the standard four suits. Wands, Swords, Cups, Pentacles. We all know those. But then I scrolled down a bit, reading through forums and a few enthusiast sites where people were arguing about the historical definitions.
I realized the core problem wasn’t the Tarot deck itself, but the language used to translate the Italian and French originals over centuries. Specifically, the fourth suit, Pentacles, is often the culprit for confusing crosswords.
I mapped out the synonyms, treating this like the highest priority troubleshooting session of the week. I needed a definitive list that covered the length variants, because that’s what crosswords exploit.
I cross-referenced the common terms used in RWS (Rider-Waite-Smith) decks, which are the most universally recognized, and then checked against older decks like the Marseilles tradition. It took me a solid fifteen minutes, which felt like an eternity when I knew my SQL routine was waiting for my final commit.
Finally, I compiled the master list in a scratchpad file on my laptop. It was so simple, yet so easily obscured by different traditions.
Here’s the breakdown I documented for myself, focusing on the names that most often appear in puzzles, especially the shorter or alternative names:
- Wands: Often called Staves or Batons.
- Swords: Usually just Swords, but sometimes Blades.
- Cups: Usually just Cups, occasionally Chalices.
- Pentacles: The big headache. Can be Coins, Disks, or even Deniers (if you’re feeling ancient).
I looked back at the crossword. Six letters, major suit. If the letters she already had matched the sequence, the answer was almost certainly PENTACLES. Wait, no, that’s nine letters. Six letters… Ah! She had an ‘O’ and an ‘S’ already locked in place from intersecting clues. Six letters: C-O-I-N-S. Coins! It fit perfectly.
She slammed her hand down on the table, grinning. “Coins! Of course! I should have known they’d use the synonym.”
Why I Bothered to Write This Down
I immediately saved that list in my ‘Reference Oddities’ folder. You might be wondering why a guy who spends his life debugging enterprise software bothers documenting something this trivial. It’s because these simple, external interruptions show you where the knowledge gaps are, not just for other people, but for yourself too.
The whole experience reminded me of a mess I dealt with at my old job. We had a huge production issue years ago—a server failure that should have been simple to roll back. Except, half the documentation was missing because the guy who set up the process had quit months before and never finished his handover. I spent three grueling nights sorting out dependencies that should have been documented in a single, simple markdown file. Simple stuff, critical stuff, but someone got lazy and assumed everyone just knew it.
That incident taught me a lesson I carry everywhere: If I spend five minutes figuring out something annoying or niche, I immediately write it down, even if it’s just four suit names and their variants. Because the next time I need it, I’m not going to spend five minutes searching; I’m going to spend five seconds looking at my own notes.
So, if you’re ever stuck on that six-letter or five-letter Tarot suit clue in a crossword, you don’t have to get dragged away from your actual work like I did. You can just check this little list I painstakingly compiled while my server queries waited patiently.
The Four Suits (and their Common Aliases)
Here are the four names and their most common alternatives that crosswords use to mess with you today. Save this somewhere, trust me.
- WANDS: Also known as STAVES or BATONS.
- SWORDS: Also known as BLADES or sometimes ACERES (rare, but watch out).
- CUPS: Also known as CHALICES or GOBLETS.
- PENTACLES: The most common alternative is COINS, but also DISKS (or Discs).
Go forth and solve that puzzle. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back and figure out why my ancient SQL stored procedure is still throwing 500 errors. That, unlike Tarot suits, is never a simple answer.
