Dice (the plural of Die, from Old French dé , from Latin datum "something given or played" [http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/die_2?view=uk AskOxford: die² ]) are small polyhedral objects, usually cubic, used for generating random numbers or other symbols. This makes dice suitable as gambling devices, especially for craps or sic bo, or for use in non-gambling tabletop games.

A traditional die is a cube (often with corners slightly rounded), marked on each of its six faces with a different number of circular patches or pits called pips. All of these pips have the same appearance within a pair, or larger set of dice, and are sized for ease of recognizing the pattern formed by the pips on a face. The design as a whole is aimed at each die providing one randomly determined integer, in the range from one to six, with each of those values being equally likely.

More generally, a variety of analogous devices are often described as dice, but necessarily in a context, or with a word or two preceding "die" or "dice", that avoids the assumption that traditional dice are intended. Such specialized dice may have cubical or other polyhedral shapes, with faces marked with various collections of symbols, and be used to produce other random results than one through six. There are also "loaded" or "crooked" dice (especially otherwise traditional ones), meant to produce skewed or even predictable results, for purposes of deception or amusement.

Ordinary dice

Common dice are small cubes 1 to 2 cm along an edge (16mm being the standard), whose faces are numbered from one to six (usually by patterns of dots called pips). It is traditional to assign pairs of numbers that total seven to opposite faces (it has been since at least classical antiquity); this implies that at one vertex the faces 1, 2 and 3 intersect. It leaves one other abstract design choice: the faces representing 1, 2 and 3 respectively can be placed in either clockwise or counterclockwise order about this vertex.

The pips on traditional European-style dice are arranged in specific patterns. The face with two usually has the dots in opposite corners, with the third face containing one between these two. The fourth face has one in each corner, and the fifth adds one in the center, forming a quincunx. The final face has two rows of three pips along opposite edges of the face. Pips on Asian-style dice are in a similar pattern, but are typically closer to the centre of the die, and the "one" pip is larger than the others. A unique feature of Asian dice is the fact that the pips for both "one" and "four" are colored red. Why this is so is unknown. But it is suggested that an entirely black and white color combination on the one side would be unlucky and red (a lucky color in Chinese culture) would counteract this. Several legends also mention that the "four" side is colored red because a Chinese emperor (one legend said it was a Ming dynasty emperor, while another stated it was Chung Tsung) ordered it as "fours" helped him win a dice game (sugoroku) against his empress. This story, however, is questionable at best, as it is also probable that "red fours" are also of common Indian origin.. Another reason why the "four" side might be colored red is because in Asian cultures, the number four is seen as unlucky, like the number thirteen in Western culture, and as mentioned before, it is colored red so that the luckiness of the red counteracts the unluckiness of the four.