Dreidel

Uncommon card · No. 102630

A dreidel, also dreidle or dreidl, ( DRAY-dəl; Yiddish: דרײדל, romanized: dreydl, plural: dreydlech; Hebrew: סביבון, romanized: sevivon) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The dreidel is a Jewish variant on the teetotum, a gambling toy found in Europe and Latin America. Each side of the dreidel bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet: נ (nun), ג (gimel), ה (hei), ש (shin). These letters are represented in Yiddish as a mnemonic for the rules of a gambling game possibly derived from teetotum played with a dreidel: nun stands for the word נישט (nisht, "not", meaning "nothing"), gimel for גאַנץ (gantz, "entire, whole"), hei for האַלב (halb, "half"), and shin for שטעל אַרײַן (shtel arayn, "put in"). However, according to folk etymology, these four letters represent the Hebrew phrase נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם (nes gadól hayáh sham, "a great miracle happened there"), referring to the miracle of the cruse of oil. For this reason, most dreidels in Israel...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Adiel lo, CC BY-SA 3.0