Dreidel
A four-sided spinning top played with at Hanukkah. Its Hebrew letters, nun, gimel, hei and shin, stand for “a great miracle happened there”; in Israel a pei replaces the shin, for “a great miracle happened here”.
Meaning
A dreidel (DRAY-dul, a Yiddish word; sevivon in modern Hebrew) has a Hebrew letter on each of its four sides: nun (נ), gimel (ג), hei (ה) and shin (ש). They are read as the initials of nes gadol haya sham, “a great miracle happened there”, the there being the land of Israel. Most dreidels made in Israel have pei (פ) in place of shin, for nes gadol haya po, “a great miracle happened here”. The same letters give the rules of the game. Each player puts a piece into the pot; a spin that lands on nun wins nothing, gimel wins the whole pot, hei wins half, and shin means putting a piece in. Jewish families play it on the eight nights of Hanukkah, while the hanukkiah burns with one more light each evening, for coins, sweets, nuts or Gelt.
Origin and history
The game is older than its Hanukkah meaning, and it came from England, Ireland and Germany. Rabbi David Golinkin traces it to the totum or teetotum of England and Ireland, a top especially popular at Christmastime, first mentioned in English about 1500–1520; the name is Latin totum, “all”. By 1801 its four letters stood for English words: T for take all, H for half, P for put down, N for nothing. In the German version the letters were N for Nichts (nothing), G for Ganz (all), H for Halb (half) and S for Stell ein (put in), and Golinkin calls the Eastern European dreidel “directly based” on it.
Jordan Kutzik, deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward, gives the Yiddish words the Hebrew letters were chosen for: nit, gants, halb and shtel arayn. In his account the letters were only a reminder of the rules. The German top was a torrel or trundl (Golinkin) or a trendel (Kutzik); Yiddish speakers called it a dreidel, “a little spinning thing”, and in some regions a goyrl (destiny) or a varfl (a little throw), names that stayed in wide use until the Holocaust. Richard Hidary of Yeshiva University dates the earliest mention of a dreidel in a Jewish context to the 18th century. His grandparents in Aleppo never played it: in Arabic- and Persian-speaking lands, he writes, hardly anyone had heard of it.
When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, the top was named sevivon, a word Kutzik credits to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s son, coined at the age of five. Kutzik writes that the Israeli pei came after the rise of Zionism, and that it broke the old Yiddish reminder of the rules.
Did the dreidel hide Torah study?
No early source says so. The story is that when the Greek rulers outlawed Torah study, Jewish children studied in secret, in caves in Chabad.org’s telling, and when a patrol came they hid their scrolls and took out tops, as if they had only been playing. Chabad.org gives it as “the common reason given” for the game; My Jewish Learning calls it a legend. Hidary writes that it “has no backing in any ancient source”. Golinkin traces it to one 19th-century rabbi and says that all such explanations “were invented after the fact”. Kutzik thinks it grew out of reading the letters as nes gadol haya sham, a reading that only became popular after the game was tied to Hanukkah.
Other readings of the four letters
Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Shapira (1783–1841), in his B’nei Yissaschar, read the letters through the four parts of a person named by the Maharal of Prague (1525–1609), and through the four kingdoms that exiled the Jews. Nun is nefesh, the soul (Babylon); gimel is guf, the body (Persia); shin is seichel, the intellect (Greece); and hei is hakol, all of them together (Rome). Rabbi Yehuda Shurpin of Chabad.org, who explains this reading, adds Shapira’s count of the letters’ numerical value: 358, the same as mashiach, Messiah, and nachash, the serpent of Eden. The Israeli letters add up to 138, the value of tzemach, a biblical name of the Messiah.
Kutzik’s view is that such readings began among Jews who spoke no Yiddish and did not know what the letters had stood for. Golinkin calls the game an irony: a festival of victory over cultural assimilation, kept with a borrowed game. Hidary reads the borrowing the other way, as Jewish communities taking a foreign game and turning it into “a symbol of resilience and victory”.
Read next
- Next in Hanukkah symbolsCruse of oilThe small jar of pure oil in the Talmud’s Hanukkah story. Sealed by the High Priest and holding enough for one day, it kept the Temple lamp burning for eight. The books of Maccabees do not tell this story.
- Played on the eight nights the hanukkiah is litHanukkiahThe nine-branched lamp lit at Hanukkah: eight lights, one for each night of the festival, and a ninth, the shamash, that lights the others.
See also
Gelt, Latkes, Sufganiyot.
Sources
- What Is A Dreidel?, My Jewish Learning, article
- What Do the Letters On the Dreidel Stand For?, My Jewish Learning, article
- The Surprising Origin of the Dreidel (David Golinkin), Rabbi David Golinkin, reprinted from A Different Light: The Hanukkah Book of Celebration (Shalom Hartman Institute and Devora Publishing), My Jewish Learning, article
- Our Favorite Hanukkah Toy Was Actually a Non-Jewish Irish Gambling Game (Jordan Kutzik, 2015), Jordan Kutzik, deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward; The Forward, 9 December 2015; archived December 2024, The Forward (Internet Archive copy), article text
- Adapt, Adopt, Subvert, Survive (Richard Hidary, Tablet, 2022), Rabbi Dr. Richard Hidary, professor of Judaic Studies, Yeshiva University; Tablet, 15 December 2022; archived February 2025, Tablet Magazine (Internet Archive copy), opening paragraph; closing paragraphs
- Why Do We Play With a Dreidel (Top) on Chanukah? (Yehuda Shurpin), Rabbi Yehuda Shurpin, content editor, Chabad.org; archived January 2025, Chabad.org (Internet Archive copy), article text
- The Hanukkiah (Hanukkah Menorah), My Jewish Learning, article
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, squares and rectangles or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .