Dreidel

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 אַרַײן (shtel arayn, "put in").

[5] Astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman spun a dreidel made by Israeli silversmith Gideon Hay for an hour in outer space.

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").

[10] This theory states that when the game spread to Jewish communities unfamiliar with Yiddish, the denotations of the Hebrew letters were not understood.

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.

[12] According to a tradition first documented in 1890,[8][11][13][14][15] the game was developed by Jews who illegally studied the Torah in seclusion as they hid, sometimes in caves, from the Seleucids under Antiochus IV.

[12] In the wake of Zionism, the dreidel was renamed sevivon (Hebrew: סביבון; from the Semetic root s-b-b, meaning 'to rotate') in modern Israel and the letters were altered, with shin generally replaced by pe.

The Hebrew word sevivon comes from the Semitic root SBB ("to turn") and was invented by Itamar Ben-Avi (the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) when he was five years old.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik used a different word, kirkar (from the root KRKR – "to spin"), in his poems,[18] but it was not adopted into spoken Hebrew.

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".

The Guinness World Record for Most Valuable Dreidel[37] was achieved by Estate Diamond Jewelry in November 2019 and was valued at $70,000 ($83,421 in current dollars, adjusted for inflation).