The History of the Dreidel

It started as a spinning-top game

People have been spinning tops for thousands of years, so nobody can point to the first one. The dreidel's direct ancestor, though, is easy to trace. It's a four-sided top with a letter on each side telling you whether to take, pay or do nothing.

In England and Ireland that game was called totum, from the Latin for "all." The name shows up in English in the early 1500s. By around 1720 it was being called a teetotum, and by 1801 its four sides were marked with letters that sound very familiar:

It was a popular game around Christmastime, played for small stakes on long winter nights.

The German version

German speakers played the same game with German letters: N for Nichts (nothing), G for Ganz (all), H for Halb (half) and S for Stell ein (put in). In German the top had names like torrel and trundl.

Jews living in German-speaking lands played it too, and that's the version that traveled east with Ashkenazi Jews. In Yiddish it became the dreidel, from dreyen, "to turn."

The letters become Hebrew

Here's the clever part. N, G, H and S map neatly onto four Hebrew letters: Nun, Gimel, Hey and Shin. And those four Hebrew letters happen to start the words Nes Gadol Haya Sham, "A great miracle happened there."

A winter game played on long nights fit Hanukkah naturally, and the letters gave it a Hanukkah meaning. In Yiddish the letters still matched the rules: nisht, gants, halb, shtel arayn. Our letters page breaks that down.

Rabbi David Golinkin, among others, has pointed out that the deeper explanations for the letters, like the hidden number 358, were all invented after the fact. The game came first.

The Torah-study legend

You may have heard this story: when the Greeks banned Torah study, Jewish children studied in secret, and when soldiers came by they pulled out dreidels and pretended to be gambling.

It's a great story. It's also very likely not history. It doesn't show up in writing until the late 1800s, roughly two thousand years after the events it describes. Tell it anyway, just tell it as a legend.

From dreidel to sevivon

When Hebrew was revived as an everyday spoken language, the dreidel needed a Hebrew name. The word that stuck was sevivon, from the Hebrew root for "turn." The coinage is credited to Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, when he was a child. More on our Hebrew name page.

In Israel the Shin was swapped for a Peh, so the dreidel says the miracle happened "here." See why Israeli dreidels are different.

The dreidel in America

Two 1920s New York inventions made the dreidel what it is in America today:

• The song. "I Have a Little Dreidel," by Samuel Goldfarb and Samuel Grossman, dates to the 1920s. It spread slowly and caught on in a big way in the 1950s. See dreidel songs.
• Chocolate gelt. The candy company Loft's started selling foil-wrapped chocolate coins in the 1920s. See the history of chocolate gelt.

The dreidel today

The dreidel is now one of the most recognizable symbols of Hanukkah. A few modern milestones:

• 2007: Major League Dreidel starts in New York City, with competitions for the longest spin.
• 2019: Guinness World Records recognizes a diamond-covered dreidel inspired by the Chrysler Building as the most valuable dreidel, valued at $70,000.
• Today: You can play it online. Like here.

Timeline

Updated October 2026