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ANSWERS: 2
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A dreidel is a four sided top with a Hebrew letter on each side. The four letters are: SHIN, HEY, GIMEL, NUN These letters mean "A Great Miracle Happened There." In Israel the dreidel is a bit different in that their letters mean " A Miracle Happened HERE!" Dreidel is also a popular game played during the Holiday. Players use pennies, nuts, raisins, or chocolate coins (gelt) as tokens or chips. The player spins the dreidel. When the dreidel stops, the letter that is facing up decides the fate. NUN - nothing happens - next player spins the dreidel GIMEL - player takes all tokens in the pot HEY - player takes half of the pot SHIN - player must put one token into the pot See http://www.holidays.net/chanukah/dreidel.html for more info.
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There is already a good answer up regarding what the letters mean in Hebrew ("a great miracle happened there"), but those same letters also refer to Yiddish words from which the rules of the game are derived. If you'll bear with me, since I don't actually speak Yiddish, I will provide the German words that are almost exactly equivalent to the Yiddish ones: Hebrew letter NUN => German/Yiddish NICHT (nothing) Hebrew letter GIML => GANZ (all, the whole) Hebrew letter HE => HALB (half) Hebrew letter SHIN => STELL (put [one in]) The word "dreidel" itself is derived from the verb "to spin," which I know is "drehen" in German. I would guess that there is a completely different Hebrew word for the same thing... it's just that most Jews have an Eastern European background and retain closer ties to the Yiddish language than to Hebrew, which survived as a classical language and was not resurrected as a modern spoken language until the late nineteenth century.
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