dé

Dé is the French term for a die, a small gaming object used to generate random numbers. The most common form is a six-faced cube whose faces are numbered from 1 to 6, typically indicated by pips. In ordinary French, the singular form is dé and the plural is dés. When rolled, a die produces a result within the range of its faces, and players may combine results from multiple dice in many games.

In addition to standard six-faced dice, many games use polyhedral dice with different numbers of faces, such as d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. In French, these are often described as « dé à X faces » (for example, un dé à vingt faces) or simply as « un d20 » in gaming communities, a notation borrowed from English. Dice are used across genres, including board games, dice games, and tabletop role-playing games.

Design and usage vary: dice are commonly made of plastic or resin and marked with numerals or pips; they can be plain or decorated and may come in sets of mixed dice for RPGs. In gaming, each face of a fair die has an equal probability of landing up, and players may roll multiple dice to determine outcomes or to calculate sums or other statistics. In casino contexts, two standard dice are used in games such as craps.

Etymology in French traces the term dé to medieval usage; the plural dés has remained the standard form in modern French.