The Italians are credited with being the inventors of Bingo!  No, the name doesn't mean anything in Italian.  Actually, the game was first called "Lo Giuoco del Lotto  D' Italia."  From Italy, it went to France in the late 1770's and they shortened the name to "Le Lotto" and played strictly among the wealthy French aristocrats.  In the 1880's the Germans then developed their version of Bingo as an educational game for children to help learn math, spelling and history. The game reached the US ( from which European country it is uncertain) during the depression and was first played at a carnival in Atlanta, Georgia.    At that time, the game was being called "Beano" because beans were used to mark the squares called on the cards.  A toy salesman from New York, named Edwin S. Lowe, changed the name of the game   when he heard a player miss-yell it as "Bingo" and not Beano.   The carnival version (drawing numbers from a cigar box and covering cards with beans) remained popular after the carnival left town.  Many people were playing Bingo by having a caller pull numbered disks out of a cigar boxes, bowls, or any other secure container and placing their beans on the appropriate number.  During the carnival, the prize was a Kewpie doll.  Afterwards, it usually was money. Mr.Lowe, seeing how popular Beano was,  decided to market the game under the miss-yelled name he heard  "Bingo."  He hired a Columbia University math professor named Carl Leffler to help increase his sales by increasing the number of cards made.  By 1930, Professor Leffler invented over 6,000 different bingo card numerical variations.  (It is said that he later went insane in his life!)