"And Bingo Was Its Name:" The History Behind the Game

"Bingo!"

So goes the player's cry of victory over the game of the same name. But what exactly did the word mean? Was it the name of a person or, as in that old song, a dog? Actually, the name for this now-famous game was nothing more than an error in pronunciation. In fact, the game we now know as bingo has gone through quite a few names and incarnations throughout the years.

Bingo's roots can actually be traced back to 16th century Italy. With the unification of Italy in 1530, a weekly national lottery system, "Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia, was introduced. The lottery was played with cards made up of three rows and nine columns. The rows were numbered, and the players would cover the numbers that were drawn out. The player who covered an entire horizontal row won the game. The lotto game eventually spread throughout Europe. France developed its own variation, "Le Lotto," which served as the prototype for the modern Bingo game. In Germany, it was used as an educational tool to help teach children, particularly in spelling and multiplication.

Bingo as we know it today really began in 1929, when Edwin S. Lowe, a toy salesman from New York, stopped by a carnival on the way to Georgia. There, he chanced upon a booth where a popular game called Beano was being played. A number would be drawn from a box and called out, and the players would then cover the corresponding number on their cards using beans for markers (hence the name). The player who completed an entire row would then shout "Beano!" and was proclaimed winner.

As it turned out, the game's inventor had indeed discovered the original lotto game in Germany and modified it to come up with Beano. The game had become such a successful carnival attraction that Lowe considered the possibility of marketing it. When he later got some of his friends to try the game out, one of them was got so excited over winning that instead of shouting out "Beano," she instead shouted "Bingo!" Inspiration hit, and the catchy new name stuck.

Lowe's enterprise was a success, but a flaw in the game soon crept up. The bingo cards initially came in sets of 12 and 24, and Lowe later discovered that many of the numbers in the cards tended to repeat themselves, producing too many winners. Realizing that a larger combination of numbers was needed to keep the game challenging, Lowe enlisted the help of Columbia University mathematician Carl Leffler, who developed 6,000 cards of jumbled combinations that limited the players' chances of winning. As bingo's popularity grew, Lowe would also be called upon to organize bingo games as fundraisers.

Essentially, bingo is a game of chance. But while it is also played commercially in casinos, today the game is largely run by parishes and charities, giving it the ironic distinction of being a form of gambling condoned by the church. It has since also been used for educational purposes (just as the original lotto game had been in Germany) in primary schools in America, as well as an aid for teaching English in foreign countries.

Bingo has literally crossed oceans to become the game that it is today. It has gone through many permutations; but from its beginnings as an early lottery system it seems to have always been meant for the masses as both a form of recreation and benefit, which it continues to be so up to now.