Why is it called Mahjong?
The name Mahjong has a charming, if debated, origin story, and it traces back to the tiles themselves and the sound they make on the table.
The sparrow connection
Mahjong comes from a Chinese name for the game that is commonly associated with the sparrow. A widely told story is that the noisy clatter of tiles being shuffled on a table reminded players of a flock of chattering sparrows. Some old sets even show a sparrow on one of the tiles, which supports the link.
Different spellings
You will see the name written many ways in English, Mahjong, Mah Jongg, Mah-Jongg, and more. That is because it was spelled out from Chinese sounds by different importers in the 1920s, each choosing their own version. There is no single official English spelling, so they are all correct.
The name carried over
When the solitaire tile game was built on computers decades later, it borrowed both the tiles and the name, even though it plays nothing like the four-player game. Learn how the two are related in is Mahjong Solitaire the same as Mahjong and where Mahjong came from.
Related questions
Where did Mahjong come from?
The four-player game Mahjong began in 19th-century China during the Qing dynasty and spread worldwide in the early 1900s. Mahjong Solitaire is far younger, a computer game popularized in 1981 as Shanghai by Brodie Lockard, using the same traditional tiles.
Is Mahjong Solitaire the same as Mahjong?
No, they are different games that share the same tiles. Mahjong Solitaire is a single-player puzzle where you remove matching pairs from a stack. Traditional Mahjong is a four-player game, closer to the card game rummy, where players draw and discard tiles to build a winning hand.
What is Mahjong Solitaire?
Mahjong Solitaire is a single-player matching game played with 144 mahjong tiles stacked into a 3D layout. You clear the board by removing matching pairs of free tiles until none are left. It borrows the tiles from the four-player game Mahjong, but the rules are completely different.
What are Wind and Dragon tiles?
Winds and Dragons are the honor tiles in a mahjong set. There are four Winds (East, South, West, North) and three Dragons (Red, Green, White), with four copies of each. That is 16 Wind tiles and 12 Dragon tiles, 28 honor tiles in all.