Every discipline or specialty has its own special jargon, developed as a sort of shorthand for commonly used words and phrases. Tarot is no different. There are words tossed around that have become compressed through overusage and now exist only as obscure combinations of letters. Here, I'll define the ones I abuse throughout this site.

RWS - The Rider Waite Smith Tarot deck, published nowadays as either the Rider Tarot or the Rider Waite Tarot. Rider is the original publishing house in England that first put out the deck. Waite (Arthur Edward) designed the deck. Smith (Pamela Colman - no 'e' as in Coleman) drew the illustrations for this deck. Her name has been added in common Tarot parlance to the name of the deck to honor her for her achievement.

LWB - The 'Little White Book' that comes with most Tarot decks. Mostly useless and redundant, but sometimes can be a source of information as to how a particular artist/designer conceived their deck. It also can tell you which printing of the deck you have.

PKT - The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur Edward Waite. This is the companion volume for the deck. The deck came out in late 1909 with a Key to the Tarot (no pictures). The Pictorial Key came out in 1911 with line art illustrations of the deck. This book has been republished by many different people under many different titles in many different combinations of chapter format. That is a story unto itself.

KT - The Key to the Tarot. The PKT without illustrations, often in a small format (80x125 mm) to fit nicely in a box with the deck. It is seldom if ever republished 'cause hey, why do that when you can have the nifty illustrations?!

PCS - Pamela Colman Smith (not Coleman), the illustrator of the RWS deck.

mm - Millimeter. One millimeter = 0.0394 inches or one inch = 25.4 millimeters. I use millimeters because they are more precise for measurements.