Upright the Nine of Swords is read as anxiety, guilt and mental anguish, often worse in imagination than in fact; reversed, as the beginning of relief, fears named rather than merely endured, or a way through despair coming into view.
Waite's own text is unusually direct that the suffering shown is largely self-generated, describing the card as a mind's own construction rather than as evidence of any external disaster, and this reading has held up better across a century of reinterpretation than most of his other small-card meanings, since it does not depend on details of the picture that later readers might see differently. The consistent advice attached to this card, across nearly every school of tarot practice, is to check whether the fear a querent describes is proportionate to an actual threat or has grown, as the picture suggests, mostly in the dark and mostly alone.
The card is frequently distinguished from the Ten of Swords, the suit's next and final number, on the basis that the Nine is dread anticipating a blow that has not yet landed, where the Ten shows the blow already struck and, paradoxically, some relief in that arrival; readers commonly treat drawing the Nine after the Ten, or the reverse, as marking whether a querent's crisis is still ahead of them or already past.
Its reversed meaning, fears faced rather than avoided, does not promise the underlying situation improves, only that naming it replaces imagining it, which the tradition treats as real progress in itself.