All 78 Cards
Tarot Meaning Library
Find the meaning of every card in the deck. Tap any card to see what it means, both upright and reversed.
Major Arcana
Wands
Cups
Swords
Pentacles
How the 78 cards fit together
A tarot deck is really two decks working side by side. The 22 Major Arcana run from the Fool at zero to the World at twenty-one and deal with the large themes of a life: change, love, loss, ambition, endings and beginnings. When several of them appear together, the situation you asked about is usually bigger than a passing week.
The remaining 56 cards are the Minor Arcana, split into four suits of fourteen. Wands carry the element of Fire and cover drive, creativity and ambition. Cups are Water and deal with emotion, love and intuition. Swords are Air and handle thought, truth, communication and conflict. Pentacles are Earth and cover work, money, home and the slow practical business of building something.
Within each suit the numbers tell a story of their own. Aces are the seed of the suit and its purest form of new energy; the middle numbers show that energy being tested, shared or fought over; the Tens bring it to its natural conclusion, for better or worse. The four court cards at the end of each suit describe people and personalities, either someone in your life or a way of behaving you are being invited to try.
Common questions about tarot cards
Where should a complete beginner start?
Start with the 22 Major Arcana rather than trying to memorise all 78 at once. They appear constantly in readings, they carry the clearest stories, and once you know them the Minor Arcana become much easier because you can hang them off themes you already recognise. Reading one card a day and simply noticing where it shows up in your life teaches more than working through a list.
Do I need to memorise all 78 meanings?
No, and most experienced readers do not recite them from memory either. What matters far more is recognising the suit and the number, because those two things alone will get you most of the way to a sensible interpretation. Looking a card up is completely normal, which is exactly what this library is for.
What is the difference between Major and Minor Arcana?
Major Arcana cards describe the big forces and turning points in a life, and they tend to be about things happening to you or through you rather than choices you make on a Tuesday. Minor Arcana cards describe the everyday texture: the conversation, the invoice, the argument, the small win. A spread made mostly of Minors usually means the situation is workable with ordinary effort.
Why do some cards look frightening?
The imagery on cards like Death, the Tower and the Ten of Swords comes from a 1909 deck designed to be read symbolically, not literally. Death is about an ending making room for something new; the Tower is about a sudden truth clearing away something unstable. None of them predicts physical harm, and in practice readers tend to find them among the more useful cards in the deck.
What do reversed cards mean?
A reversed card generally shows the same energy blocked, delayed, turned inward or taken to excess, rather than flipped into its opposite. Some readers do not use reversals at all, which is a perfectly valid approach. On this site reversals appear in readings by default, and each card page explains both orientations.
Which deck are these meanings based on?
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, first published in 1909 with artwork by Pamela Colman Smith. It is the most widely used tarot deck in the English-speaking world and the reference point most other decks are built against, which means these meanings will broadly carry over if you use a different deck.