• The world's tallest spinning dreidel, built by college students in Montreal, stands more than 22 feet tall.
• In 1998, at least 200 people in Skokie, Illinois, attempted to set the first world record for the greatest number of dreidels spun at once. Since then, students at the University of Maryland and Indiana University have been breaking each other's dreidel-spinning world records Hanukkah after Hanukkah.

When you first twist the dreidel, it stores up energy. The dreidel will continue spinning until two outside forces, gravity and friction, cause it to wobble. Gravity is the force that draws the dreidel to the earth's center (or your tabletop, if it gets in the way). Friction is the force that causes things that touch each other to resist moving. In our case, the tabletop and air rub against the dreidel, causing friction. The more friction there is, the sooner the dreidel will fall.

However, when the dreidel spins quickly around its axis, the imaginary line on which it rotates, it tends to resist the influence of gravity because a third force, called centrifugal force, pulls inward on the top. Centrifugal force keeps the dreidel standing upright on the tabletop with the dreidel's axis perpendicular to the table. As the spinning slows, friction and gravity try to make it fall until, eventually, these forces win out and the dreidel falls to a stop--hopefully on a gimmel.