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Daniel writes

“How did it become a card? Why is it used to mean first…or best? It replaces 1 in a deck of cards and is also the highest (as well as the lowest) card in a deck. How did it become synonymous with pilots?”

Lots of questions.

Fortunately I’ve got lots of answers.

The word seems to have come to English from Latin via the intermediary of French.  In Latin it is said to have first referred to a kind of coin.

The various dictionaries point in various directions before Latin. An Etruscan source is suggested by John Ayto’s Word Origins.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests instead a Tarentine word as that might have come from a Greek word eis.

In fact these origins aren’t all that far apart since a Tarentine word would have come from the city of Taranto which is located in the arch of the foot under the heel of the boot of Italy; the Etruscan stomping ground was more the front of the shin of the boot of Italy; and the Greeks were trading and setting up colonies all over this part of the Mediterranean before the rise of the Roman Empire.

I suppose the association between the coin and the numeric value “one” must have been something similar to the idea that if I tell you I have a buck, you know I have “one dollar.”

The “one” meaning is very ancient and is the meaning that came with the word into English circa the year 1300.  That first usage was in reference to games of dice where the side with only one dot was called the ace.

Daniel asks how the word ace came to be associated with pilots.

Not all pilots are aces, only the good ones.

It was World War I flyers who were first called aces, and only when they had brought down 10 enemy aircraft.

The reason these people were called aces is sort of the flip-side of an ace in dice, and is implied in the other part of Daniel’s question.

It may seem strange to us, but because an ace in dice was a low score, before the word ace was used to refer to someone who was particularly good, it was used to refer to things that were worthless or unlucky.

The usage of ace to refer to a card with a value of one entered English in 1553 and it was because this card was sometimes the lowest and sometimes the highest value card that the word ace itself began to gain status.

By 1889 we have an ace in tennis being a very good thing, a serve so fast and accurate that the opponent can’t get their racket on it.

Coincidentally I was listening recently to the BBC History Magazine podcast where they were talking about those First World War flying aces.

One point was that contrary to the image given by Snoopy fighting the Red Barron, these guys didn’t go up specifically to fight.  Their job was to protect the bomber aircraft.

What point just shooting down some other pilot? Much more important that your bombers get through and the reason the enemy pilot is up there in the first place is to stop those bombers.