What Are Pips?

Where the word comes from

English has used pip for the spots on cards and dice since the seventeenth century. The Merriam-Webster entry still marks the origin as uncertain, which is unusual for a word this common and this old. The older informal term was spot, and it has not entirely died — people still say a “six-spot” die — but rulebooks, manufacturers and dictionaries all settled on pip.

The word has since collected unrelated meanings: a seed in an apple, a beep in a radio time signal, a rank badge on a uniform shoulder, and — the one that fills search results — the smallest tick of a currency exchange rate. Those are homonyms, not relatives. If you arrived here looking for the trading term, this is the wrong site entirely, and no amount of reading on will help.

Pips on dice

A six-sided die carries 21 pips in total, one face each of 1 through 6. There is no blank face, which is the first real difference from dominoes — dice values start at one, domino values start at zero.

The arrangement is not arbitrary either. On a standard Western die, opposite faces sum to seven: 1 opposite 6, 2 opposite 5, 3 opposite 4. That convention is old enough that archaeologists use it to date and classify dice, and it means you can always work out the hidden bottom face by subtracting the top one from seven.

The pip layout matters too. Dice pips sit in a fixed pattern of up to nine positions, which is why a five reads instantly as a five without counting — the quincunx shape is recognised whole. Dominoes borrow the same trick, and it is the reason a practised player stops counting dots on a board and starts reading them.

Pips on playing cards

Here the word shifts slightly. On a playing card the pips are the suit symbols printed on the face — the hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs. The seven of clubs has seven club pips arranged in the familiar column pattern, and its value is that count.

Cards from two to ten are consequently called pip cards, in contrast to the court cards — jack, queen, king — which show a figure instead of a countable arrangement. The ace sits awkwardly in the middle: one pip, usually oversized.

This is the sense that produced most of the word's idioms. “Squeeze until the pips squeak” is about fruit seeds rather than cards, but the card sense is where the arrangement-you-count idea entered English, and it is why the same word covers three quite different objects.

How to count pips

Counting pips means adding the dot counts, and the only thing that trips people up is which dots they are meant to be adding.

• On a single tile: add both halves. A 4-3 is worth seven pips.
• In a hand or tray: add every tile. This is how most traditional domino games score — the player left holding the fewest pips wins the round.
• In a puzzle region: add only the halves lying inside the region's boundary. This is the one that catches people out, because a domino can straddle a boundary and contribute one half to each of two regions. The tile is not in a region; its halves are.

That last distinction is worth internalising before you play. A great many stuck boards come from someone adding a whole tile into a region that only contains half of it. The full rules page works through a straddling tile square by square.

What pips means in this puzzle

The daily puzzle takes its name from those dots. You are given a grid divided into coloured regions and a tray of dominoes, and you cover every square so that each region satisfies the rule on its badge. Some badges demand an exact pip sum. Some demand every value inside be identical, or every value be different. Some only set a bound — more than three, fewer than eight.

Because the rules are all about pip values rather than about tiles, the definition at the top of this page does real work. A region does not care that a four arrived from a 4-1 rather than a 4-6. It cares that a four is there.

That single fact is behind the most misread rule in the format, which has its own page: what “not equal” means in pips.

Pips that are not dots at all

Two edge cases worth knowing, because both come up and both look like exceptions.

Modern digital versions frequently print the numeral instead of the dots at small sizes, since six dots on a phone screen is a smudge. The value is the same and the word still applies — pip refers to the unit of value, and the dot arrangement is simply its usual rendering. A domino half showing “5” has five pips.

And on court cards, the small suit symbols in the corners are indices rather than pips: they tell you the card's identity without telling you a count. A king of hearts is not a one-pip card. This is why the two-through-ten cards get the name pip cards and the figures do not.

Common questions

What are pips?

Pips are the small dots printed on dominoes, dice and playing cards that show a value by their count rather than by a written numeral. A domino half showing four dots is worth four; a die face with two dots is a two.

How many pips are on a set of dominoes?

A standard double-six set has 28 tiles and 168 pips in total. Each of the seven values from 0 to 6 appears eight times across the set, so the total is 8 × (0+1+2+3+4+5+6) = 168.

How many pips are on a die?

A standard six-sided die carries 21 pips — one face each of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Opposite faces always add to seven, which is why the 1 and 6 sit on opposing sides.

What are pips on playing cards?

On playing cards the pips are the suit symbols themselves — the hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs printed on the face. A seven of hearts has seven heart pips. Cards from two to ten are called pip cards, as opposed to the court cards.

Does a blank domino half have pips?

No, and that is the point of it. A blank half carries zero pips and is worth zero. It is a real value, not a missing one, which matters in the puzzle: a blank counts toward an all-different region exactly as a four does.

What does pips mean in the daily puzzle game?

It is the name of the game, taken from the dots on the dominoes you place. Each region on the board carries a rule about the pip values inside it — an exact sum, all equal, all different, or a comparison — and you cover the grid so that every region is satisfied.

Is a pip the same thing as a spot?

In practice yes. "Spot" is the older informal term, which survives in phrases like a "six-spot" die. Dictionaries and rulebooks settled on pip, and domino and card manufacturers use it too.

Why do people also search for pips in finance?

A completely separate meaning: in currency trading a pip is the smallest price increment a rate can move, usually the fourth decimal place. Same word, unrelated subject. Nothing on this site is about that.