A tarot deck is a set of 78 cards used to tell someone's fortune — to say what may happen to them, or what kind of person they are, or what they should do. The cards have pictures on them, and each picture has a meaning: the Sun, the Moon, Death, the Lovers, the Tower. A reader lays some cards out on the table in a pattern, then reads them together, like reading a sentence made of pictures. 'Tarot' is usually the whole system or the whole deck, not one card — you say a tarot reading, a tarot deck, a tarot card, and often just 'tarot' alone: 'She does tarot.' The word can be used for the cards, for the practice, or for the whole body of meanings behind them. Two things worth knowing, though. First, the cards started out as an ordinary card game in Italy in the 1400s — people played with them the way we play poker, and in parts of France and central Europe they still do. Fortune-telling came later, in the 1700s, and the ancient-Egypt stories attached to the cards are not history. Second, in English, people who use tarot often talk about it softly: not 'this card says you will lose your job' but 'this card is about endings.' Even believers usually treat it as something to think with, not a machine that prints the future. Someone who does not believe in it at all may still say 'that's very Tower energy' as a joke — the pictures have become shared language.