Dreidel

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The teetotum was inscribed with letters denoting the Latin words for "nothing", "everything", "half", and "put in". In German this came to be called a trendel, with German letters for the same concepts. Adapted to the Hebrew alphabet when Jews adopted the game, these letters were replaced by nun which stands for the Yiddish word נישט ( nisht, "not", meaning "nothing"), gimel for גאַנץ ( gants, "entire, whole"), hei for האַלב ( halb, "half"), and shin for שטעל אַרײַן ( shtel arayn, "put in"). The letters served as a means to recalling the rules of the game.

This theory states that when the game spread to Jewish communities unfamiliar with Yiddish, the denotations of the Hebrew letters were not understood. As a result, there arose Jewish traditions to explain their assumed meaning. However, in Judaism there are often multiple explanations developed for words. A popular conjecture had it that the letters abbreviated the words נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם ( nes gadól hayá sham, "a great miracle happened there"), an idea that became attached to dreidels when the game entered into Hanukkah festivities.

According to a tradition first documented in 1890, the game was developed by Jews who illegally studied the Torah in seclusion as they hid, sometimes in caves, from the Seleucid Empire under Antiochus IV. At the first sign of Seleucids approaching, their Sefer Torah would be concealed and be replaced by dreidels. The variant names goyrl (destiny) and varfl (a little throw) were also current in Yiddish, until the Holocaust. "Dreidel" was translated to modern Hebrew as sevivon (; see Etymology below), and in modern Israel the letters were altered, with shin generally replaced by pe. This yields the reading נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה פֹּה ( nes gadól hayá po, "a great miracle happened here").

In the lexicon of Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia and Tatarstan the local historian A. V. Altyntsev utilised several other appellations of a dreidel, such as volchok (Russian: волчок, "top"), khanuke-volchok, fargl, varfl, dzihe and zabavke (Russian: забавка, "entertaining piece", "toy").Altyntsev A. V., "The Concept of Love in Ashkenazim of Udmurtia and Tatarstan", Nauka Udmurtii. 2013. № 4 (66), p. 130. (Алтынцев А.В., "Чувство любви в понимании евреев-ашкенази Удмуртии и Татарстана". Наука Удмуртии. 2013. №4. С. 130: Комментарии.)

• To start the game, every participant puts one game piece into the center "pot". Every player also puts one piece into the pot when the pot is empty or there is only one game piece in the pot.
• Each player spins the dreidel once during their turn. Depending on which side is facing up when it stops spinning, the player whose turn it is gives or takes game pieces from the pot:
• If ( nun) is facing up, the player does nothing. (Yiddish: nischt.)
• If ( gimel) is facing up, the player gets everything ( ganz in Yiddish) in the pot.
• If ( hei) is facing up, the player gets half ( halb in Yiddish) of the pieces in the pot. If there are an odd number of pieces in the pot, the player takes half the pot rounded up to the nearest whole number. If hei is facing up and only one piece is in the pot, the player can either take the piece or not.
• If ( shin) is facing up, the player donate s ( schenk in Yiddish) one of their game pieces to the pot (sometimes accompanied by the chant "shin, shin, put one in"
  Marilee LeBon (2026). 9780028642000, Alpha. . ISBN 9780028642000
  ). In some game versions, the player adds three game pieces to the pot, one for each stem of the letter shin ().
• If the player is out of pieces, they are either "out" or may ask another player for a "loan".

These rules are comparable to the rules for a classic four-sided teetotum, where the letters A, D, N and T form a mnemonic for the rules of the game, aufer (take), depone (put), nihil (nothing), and totum (all). Similarly, the Hebrew letters on a dreidel may be taken as a mnemonic for the game rules in Yiddish. Occasionally, in the United States, the Hebrew letters on the dreidel form an English-language mnemonic about the rules: hei or "H" for "half"; gimel or "G" for "get all"; nun or "N" for "nothing"; and shin or "S" for "share".

Robert Feinerman has shown that the game of dreidel is unfair, in that the first player to spin has a better expected outcome than the second player, and the second better than the third, and so on.

In 2009, Good Morning America published a story on Dreidel Renaissance reporting on the rising popularity of the dreidel. Dreidel games that have come out on the market since 2007 include No Limit Texas Dreidel, a cross between traditional dreidel and Texas Hold'em poker, invented by a Judaica company called ModernTribe. Other new dreidel games include Staccabees and Maccabees.