Solitaire (Card Game)

Solitaire, also called patience or card solitaire, names a whole genre of card games sharing one common aim: arranging the cards into some systematic order, or in a few variants pairing them off in order to discard them, most often designed for a single player though some variants exist for more than one. Patience is the earliest documented name for the genre in both British and American English, reflecting the games' original association with cultivating the virtue of patience, and though North American usage shifted increasingly toward solitaire over the twentieth century, the games scholar David Parlett argues patience remains the more precise term, since patience refers specifically to card games while solitaire also covers unrelated single-player pursuits such as dominoes and peg-board games, and because patience games, despite the name, can in fact be played competitively among several players. American authorities Wood and Goddard define patience as any game played with cards whose object is to arrange them into a systematic order, noting that most such games target a single player even though multiplayer versions exist, while reserving solitaire, properly, for any game one player can play entirely alone; contemporary North American usage nonetheless favours solitaire colloquially for single-player card games, sometimes clarified as card solitaire, while writers outside North America more often reserve solitaire itself for single-player board and table games such as peg solitaire, and international authors frequently use both terms together, or the phrase card games for one, to avoid the ambiguity.