Queen (playing card)

In many European languages, the king and queen begin with the same letter so the latter is often called dame (lady) or variations thereof.

Similarly, in Hearts, the queen of spades is to be avoided, and is called a variety of unsavoury names.

In the Paris pattern, each court card is identified as a particular historical or mythological personage as follows:[1][2] Queens may have been an invention of early German cardmakers.

The Ambraser Hofjagdspiel (circa 1440 to 1445) and many other surviving 15th-century packs include the Queen as a fourth independent rank from the King, Ober, and Unter.

[3] Regarding the anonymous nursery rhyme, "The Queen of Hearts" (published 1782), Katherine Elwes Thomas claims, in The Real Personage of Mother Goose, that the Queen of Hearts[clarification needed] was based on Elizabeth of Bohemia.