Last updated: December 4, 2009 at 11:15 am. Posted Friday, December 4, 2009 by Las Vegas Blog Staff in Gaming, Las Vegas Casinos. Comments Off on Happy National Dice Day.

It’s National Dice Day, one of our favorite days of the year! Here are some fascinating facts about these captivating cubes that inspire so much fun.

Dice are the world’s oldest gaming devices, used even before recorded history.

Before dice were used for games of chance, numbered cubes were used by those who believed they could help tell the future.

“Astragalomancy” means “the practice of divination by means of dice.”

Casinos never use dice with round corners.

Novice craps player Patricia Demauro had the longest craps roll in casino history on May 23, 2009, at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City. She rolled for four hours and 18 minutes (with 154 rolls). It was just the second time she’d played craps.

Gamblers in ancient Greece made dice from the anklebones and shoulder blades of sheep.

The Arabic word for “knucklebone” is the same as the word for dice.

Even today, dice users refer to dice as bones, as in “Shake them bones!” And there’s even a dice game called Bones.

In eighteenth-century English gambling dens, there was an employee whose only job was to swallow the dice if there was a police raid.

A musician and comic by the name of Reve White is believed to have invented the dice clock, one of Sin City’s most popular souvenirs.

Precision dice, used for craps, may have a polished finish (making them transparent) or a sand finish (making them translucent).

The oldest known dice ever unearthed were part of a 5000-year-old backgammon set found in Iran.

The term “die” comes from “datum” which translates as “something played.”

Casino dice are made of cellulose acetate, and are manufactured to a tolerance of 1/10,000th of an inch.

In craps, various rolls of the dice have nicknames. For example: Snake eyes (2), Little Joe (4), Ada from Decatur (8), Nina from Pasadena (9) and puppy paws (two fives).

Have the best National Dice Day ever!