As others have mentioned, spiel may actually be derived from German Spiel rather than, or in addition to, Yiddish shpil.

In German, syllable-initial /ʃ/ (the "sh" sound) is written with the trigraph <sch> before <r>, <l>, <m> and <n> (i.e. letters that represent resonants), but with the single letter <s> before the letters <t> and <p> (i.e. letters that represent plosives). I think this explains why we don't see /ʃ/ represented by <s> in words such as schlep, schlock, schmooze. German words spelled with <st> and <sp> are generally anglicized in English pronunciation to have /st/ and /sp/ (e.g. see this question about Einstein).

Yiddish romanization is considerably less standardized than German orthography, but in general, /ʃ/ is represented by <sh> in all contexts, including syllable-initial <sht> <shp>. There are some variant spellings used in English that have <scht>, such as "schtick" (a variant spelling of shtick); I didn't find any commonly used word spelled with <schp>, but people certainly might use that for non-standardized transcriptions of Yiddish words.


Spiel derives from German spielen not from American Yiddish like the other terms you mention (boldface mine):

  • "glib speech, pitch," 1896, probably from verb (1894) meaning "to speak in a glib manner," earlier "to play circus music" (1870, in a German-American context), from German spielen "to play," from Old High German spilon (cognate with Old English spilian "to play"). The noun also perhaps from German Spiel "play, game."

Source: Etymonline

Wiktionary hints at a possible relation with the Yiddish term shpil from which probably the alternative pronunciation originates:

  • From the German Spiel ‎(“game, performance”), perhaps via Yiddish שפּיל ‎(shpil). Cognate with Old English spilian ‎(“to revel, play”).