Every new player hits this moment: you see 'Mah Jongg' on the League card, 'mahjong' in the newspaper, 'mah-jongg' in a 1920s ad, and 'mahjongg' on a solitaire app — and wonder if you've been spelling it wrong all along. You haven't. Here's the two-minute history that explains every variant.
Where the spellings come from
The game is Chinese — 麻將 (májiàng) — and when Joseph Babcock imported it to America in the early 1920s he coined and trademarked the spelling 'Mah-Jongg', double g, hyphen and all, as a brand name for his sets. The craze outlived the trademark, but the double-g spelling stuck in American tradition.
When the National Mah Jongg League formed in 1937 to standardize the American game, it kept the traditional double-g: 'Mah Jongg.' That's why the yearly card, League materials, and many longtime players write it that way to this day.
Meanwhile, the rest of the English-speaking world settled on the simpler one-word 'mahjong' — it's the spelling in dictionaries, Wikipedia, news coverage, and app stores, and it's what the overwhelming majority of people type into Google.
So which is correct?
Both. 'Mah Jongg' (double g) signals the American game and the League's tradition; 'mahjong' is the standard modern English spelling for the game in all its forms. They are the same word wearing different decades' clothes.
Our house style: we write 'American Mahjong' for clarity and searchability, and we tip our hat to 'Mah Jongg' as the traditional American spelling — the one you'll see on the card at every club table.
Why it matters when you search
Search engines treat the spellings as near-synonyms, so you'll find your way regardless. But know the pattern: 'mahjong' alone often surfaces the solitaire tile-matching computer game (a completely different thing); adding 'American' — American mahjong — reliably gets you the four-player game with the card, the Charleston, and the jokers. That's the game this school teaches.