means A spade is a flat-bladed digging tool you push into the earth with your foot, or one of the four suits in a deck of playing cards, marked by a black leaf-shaped pip.

from The digging tool comes from Old English 'spadu,' a word with deep Germanic roots and a likely cousin in the Greek 'spathe,' meaning a broad blade. The card suit, oddly, takes a separate path: it arrived through Italian 'spade,' the plural of 'spada,' meaning sword — itself from that same Greek 'spathe.' So while English speakers see a digging spade in the pip, the symbol was born from a blade. The phrase 'call a spade a spade' traces back through Latin to a mistranslation of a Greek proverb about plain speaking — and is unrelated to the later, separate racial slur.