There’s a brand new online bingo site just launched last week in Finland, and the locals are going crazy for it and just can’t get enough!

I’m not exactly a linguistic expert, let alone in English, but I wonder how you say ‘Bingo’ in Finnish? It’s probably one of those words that’s impossible to translate. And where did the word Bingo come from anyway?

Some say that the term Bingo is related to the game of Keno, dating back to as early as 1814 in USA, which comes from the Latin word ‘quini’ - meaning five (winning numbers) as in a Lotto game.

Others say that Bingo started off as a Lotto-like game that can be traced back to the mid-16th century in Italy, and slowly spread across Europe arriving in the USA in 1929 where it was promptly called Beano - due to the  fact that it was played with beans instead of bingo balls!

I think I’d enjoy a game of Beano, it does have a certain ring to it, but if you compare the phrase Online Beano to Online Bingo, for me the latter comes out tops.

Written by John Witherspoon for BingoStreet.com – the top resource in the UK for online bingo promotions and the best free bingo games.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Online Bingo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.