bastos

Bastos is the plural of the noun basto in Spanish and Portuguese, meaning a staff, rod, or club. The term is used to refer to a physical club and serves as the name of a playing-card suit in traditional Latin-suited decks.

In traditional Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking card decks, there are four suits: oros, copas, espadas, and bastos. The bastos suit is typically depicted as clubs or wooden batons, with regional variation in artwork. In many card games that use these decks, the bastos suit has its own ranking and rules that differ from other suits, and the exact order can vary by game and country.

Etymology and related usage place the term as a Romance-language cognate descended from an ancient word for a staff or cudgel. The sense of basto as a physical implementation of a club or baton underpins its use as a card-suit name in Iberian-influenced cultures.

Beyond cards, bastos also appears as a surname and as a toponym in the Portuguese-speaking world. As a surname, it is found in various countries, often linked to family origins or geographic associations. As a place name, Bastos may refer to multiple locations in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking regions, reflecting historical usage of the term in naming.

Overall, bastos denotes a concept of a staff-like object in language, with its most prominent modern usage in the name of the clubs suit in traditional Spanish- and Portuguese-style playing cards.