Pip Card

A numbered Minor Arcana card, Ace through Ten.

The pip cards are the numbered Minor Arcana — Ace through Ten in each suit, forty cards in all. The name comes from the “pips,” the small suit symbols on a card (three cups, five swords, and so on).

Read together, a suit's pips trace a small story from the Ace's raw beginning to the Ten's completion, with the number marking the stage. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck gave every pip a full illustrated scene, which is a large part of why it became the standard deck for reading.

Related terms

• Numerology
• Ace
• Minor Arcana
• Rider-Waite-Smith

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