Home · Guides

Why Slots Use Cherries, Bars and Sevens: Symbol Meanings and History

Slot symbols are not a secret code. The bell survives from the first slot machine of 1895, the fruit and the BAR sign started as chewing gum advertising, and the seven was a luck sign long before reels existed. The pictures changed jobs over a century; the logic behind them never did. Common symbols pay little, rare symbols pay a lot.

The bell rang first: San Francisco, 1895

Charles Fey, a San Francisco mechanic, built the Liberty Bell in 1895: three spinning reels with an automatic payout, and a top prize for lining up three cracked bells. The other reel symbols were horseshoes and playing-card suits. The bell wasn't decoration, it was the machine's name on its own reels. Competitors copied the design so thoroughly that a bell still sits in the middle of classic paytables 130 years later, including ours.

Cherries and BAR came out of a gum pack

In the early 1900s, anti-gambling laws in many American cities banned cash payouts, so operators sidestepped them by paying winners in chewing gum. The fruit on the reels showed the flavor you'd won: land cherries, collect cherry gum. The Bell-Fruit Gum Company put its logo, a stylized bar, on the reels too. That's the whole mystery of the BAR symbol: it's a gum trademark. When machines went back to paying money, nobody bothered to redraw the art.

Lucky Crown carries a fossil of that era. On our classic machine the reels draw a gold BAR, but in the source code that symbol is still named lemon: the fruit age survives one layer beneath the paint.

The fruit stayed for the same reason the bell did: players already knew what it meant.

The seven was lucky before slots existed

Slots didn't invent the lucky seven, they borrowed it. Seven already carried luck in dice and in Western culture broadly, so early manufacturers used it as the premium symbol every player would read as "the good one" without a manual. It still holds that job: in Lucky Crown's classic machine, three sevens pay 17× your bet, the highest line win on the board.

Why cherries pay the least: count them on the reel

Symbol values track frequency, not fruit preference. A symbol that appears often on the reel strips lines up often, so it has to pay small; a rare one can pay big. On Lucky Crown's classic 3×3 machine, each reel strip is 25 symbols long and carries six cherries but exactly one seven. The paytable mirrors that hierarchy directly:

Every slot ever built runs on this same trade. The cherry is the machine's way of paying you often without paying you much.

Modern symbols are functions, not pictures

The newer reel symbols have no gum-era backstory. They're rules first and pictures second. A wild substitutes for other symbols and a scatter pays anywhere, whatever either happens to look like. In Lucky Crown the wild is a crown, and the art is beside the point. Bonus symbols follow the same pattern: on our 5×3 machines, a gold coin symbol doesn't pay a line win at all, it feeds the jackpot ladder.

Symbols have always been a costume over the math

Here is a fact only a slot developer can show you from the inside. In Lucky Crown, symbols are logical slots and the artwork is a dictionary: the engine asks for "cherry" and the skin decides what to draw. The same machine wearing the Golden Pharaoh skin renders the cherry as a lotus and the seven as a pharaoh's mask. In Buffalo Trail those become a cactus and a buffalo head; in Dragon Fortune, a lantern and a dragon's head. Four wardrobes over the same six symbols.

That's not a modern trick. It's the gum story repeating: the reels have been reskinned to fit the moment since 1900s operators swapped coins for cherry-flavored sticks. The pictures are marketing. The frequencies are the machine.

Spin the originals on your wrist

Everything in this article is live on Lucky Crown's classic 3×3 machine for Apple Watch, with the exact paytable printed above. It's free and plays offline, with no real money involved. Get it on the App Store or on Google Play, and check which symbol shows up most yourself.