BINGO. Whether you remember it from the cards and dot ink bottles or because it was the dog’s name in one of your favorite nursery rhymes, Bingo and its 500-year history shines during the month of December.

According to the National Day Calendar, December is recognized as Bingo’s Birthday — here at the newsroom, we didn’t realize Bingo had a birthday, albeit a month-long one at that. However, it might be pretty cool to call attention to one of the oldest forms of modern gambling.

The game of Bingo began in the year 1530 in Italy and was known as “LoGiuoco del Lotto D’Italia,” and is still played today, almost every Saturday in Italy. The French adopted the game next as “Le Lotto,” then on to the United Kingdom as “Housey-Housey.”

Bingo arrived as “Beano” in the U.S. in 1929 when Edwin Lowe modernized the game and boxed it for retail. After witnessing how popular it became, Lowe hired mathematician Carl Leffler who developed thousands of combinations of numbered playing cards. It is rumored that the name of the game was changed by Lowe after he heard a winner shout the word bingo one day by mistake.

Maybe Bingo has stuck around for so long because of the fun, or possibly because it is not only fun, but educational as well. It was first played in Germany in the early 1800s by German school children to help them learn their times tables.

Fun Bingo Fact: According to Guinness World Records, the largest number of individuals to ever play in one bingo game, at the same time, was 70,080 in December of 2006 in Bogota, Colombia.