Four Letters, One on Each Side, and a Legend About Hiding Torah Study

A dreidel is a four sided spinning top, each face marked with one Hebrew letter, nun, gimel, hei and shin outside Israel, read together as the initials of the phrase nes gadol haya sham, a great miracle happened there, while in Israel the shin is replaced with a pei, changing the phrase to a great miracle happened here, and the top is spun in a simple game of chance played especially by children during Hanukkah.

Popular tradition holds that Jewish children under the religious persecution of the Seleucid Empire, in the period the Hanukkah story itself commemorates, used the dreidel and its innocuous appearance as a gambling toy to disguise ongoing Torah study, quickly switching to spinning the top and pretending to play a game whenever soldiers or officials approached, so that what looked like idle gambling was in fact a cover for forbidden religious instruction.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica records this account as the popular explanatory legend surrounding the game rather than as an episode independently attested in the earliest historical sources for the Hanukkah period, a distinction worth keeping honestly in view even though the story remains a beloved and widely repeated part of how the custom is explained to children today.