What 🃭 means
The thirteenth numbered trump of a tarot pack. A tarot pack has 78 cards: four suits of 14 (with a knight between jack and queen), 21 trumps numbered 1 to 21, and the Fool. Trumps beat any suit card, and a higher trump beats a lower one, so 13 beats trumps 1 to 12 and loses to 14 to 21. Unicode encodes the whole pack: is the Fool, to are trumps 1 to 21.
The characters are named by number, the rank each card holds, not by picture, and decks really do disagree about what trump 13 shows. In the French Tarot Nouveau decks used for the card game today, the trumps carry scenes of everyday life. In Marseille-style decks and the fortune-telling decks derived from them, trump XIII is Death, usually a skeleton with a scythe. Fonts that cover the character draw it their own way, often as a simple card frame marked 13 rather than a skeleton.
Does 🃭 mean the Death card?
Only when you read it as a tarot-reading card; in the game it is just 13. In fortune-telling, Death is card XIII of the Major Arcana, the 22 picture cards readers use. In many old Marseille decks it was left unnamed, which is why some readers still call it "the card with no name". Most modern readers don't take it literally: the usual reading is an ending, a clean break or a transformation. So if someone sends 🃭 to mean "death", they are borrowing the card's name; a tarot fan may read it as a big change instead.
In the card game of tarot, best known today in France, and in related games such as Tarock in Austria and tarocchi in Italy, trump 13 has no special role. The key cards are trump 1, trump 21 and the Fool, called the bouts in France: the more of them you capture, the fewer points you need to win. Thirteen is a middle trump you play to take a trick (one round of cards) or to force out higher trumps.
Tarot's trumps, the trionfi or "triumphs", appeared in Italy in the 1440s as a fifth set of allegorical cards added to the ordinary pack; the English word trump began as a form of "triumph". A German game, Karnöffel, had a trump-like suit even earlier, in the 1420s. Tarot was a game for three centuries before fortune-telling with it spread from late-18th-century France.
Part of the collection
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
4Worth knowing
- Unicode's Playing Cards block arrived in 2010 with the suit cards; the 21 trumps and the Fool followed in 2014, completing a full 78-card tarot pack as text characters.
- The reference picture in Unicode's own proposal for trump 13 is not Death at all but a French everyday scene: people out shopping.
Questions people ask
3Is 🃭 an emoji?
No. It is a plain text symbol from the Playing Cards block, with no standard emoji form. How it looks, and whether it shows at all, depends on your font.
Why does 🃭 show as an empty box?
Your font doesn't include the Playing Cards block. Switching to or installing a symbol font that covers it, such as Symbola or Noto Sans Symbols 2, fixes it.
Is the Death card a bad omen?
Not usually. Most tarot readers take card XIII as an ending that makes room for something new, not as a prediction of death.
More like this
12
Collections with 🃭
1
How to type or find 🃭
- Also called
- tarot trump 13 · tarot XIII · Death card character
- Search it as
- trump 13 · tarot card 13 · tarot trump · death card · tarot death · playing card trump · tarot unicode · XIII card
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🃭\1F0EDCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.