In Hebrew a dreidel is a sevivon (סביבון), pronounced seh-vee-VOHN. It comes from a Hebrew root meaning "turn," just like the Yiddish word dreidel comes from dreyen, "to turn." The plural is sevivonim.
Sevivon
סביבון, sevivon, is built on the Hebrew root ס־ב־ב, which has to do with turning or going around. You'll hear the same root in saviv, "around," and in the Hebrew children's song "Sevivon, Sov, Sov, Sov," where sov means "spin."
Say it like this: seh-vee-VOHN, with the stress on the last syllable. More than one is sevivonim, seh-vee-voh-NEEM.
Where the word came from
When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were a lot of everyday things that didn't have Hebrew names yet, including the dreidel.
Sevivon is credited to Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man most associated with reviving Hebrew. Ben-Avi reportedly came up with it as a kid.
It wasn't the only candidate. The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik used the word kirkar, from a root meaning "to spin," in his poems. It never caught on in everyday speech. Sevivon won.
Dreidel in Yiddish
Dreidel (often spelled dreydl in Yiddish transliteration) comes from dreyen, "to turn." English speakers usually say it DRAY-dl.
Yiddish had other names for it too. Two that were used before the Holocaust:
- Goyrl, meaning "fate" or "destiny." Pretty accurate for a game of pure luck.
- Varfl, roughly "a little throw."
Other names around the world
- English: dreidel, dreidl, dreydl, and sometimes draydel. All the same thing. Its older English cousin was the teetotum.
- German: the spinning-top game it came from went by names like torrel and trundl.
- Russian-speaking Jews have used words like volchok, the Russian word for a spinning top.
The history of the dreidel page explains how all these versions connect.
In Israel
Israelis play with a sevivon that has a Peh instead of a Shin, because the miracle happened "here." Same game, same rules, different last letter.
Updated October 2026