Trump

A trump is one of the 22 picture cards of a tarot deck, from The Magician to The World, with the Fool often counted among them. The word comes from the Italian trionfi, triumphs, the name used for the cards in the 1440s, and the same idea passed into many card games. In the tarot game the trumps outrank every suit card. The name Major Arcana is a 19th-century occult coinage for the same cards; trump is the older and plainer term. A common confusion is with trump suits in games like bridge, which borrowed the word but not the cards. See Major and Minor Arcana.