A competition based on chance, in which numbered tickets are sold and prizes (often money) are awarded to the holders of numbers drawn at random. The word lottery has also come to mean any of the specific games offered, or even more broadly, any competition whose first stage relies on chance, whether that is a game in which players pay a fee to enter and names are drawn or an arrangement in which people play cards for a prize.
There is an inextricable human urge to gamble, and lottery advertising aims to harness this impulse by offering the promise of riches in exchange for a small sum of money. In the modern world, this has taken the form of a state-sponsored game of chance in which winning numbers are selected at random from a pool of all tickets purchased. A state may hold a single lottery or run several at the same time, and the resulting jackpots can be enormous.
The earliest lotteries were private games of chance in which a prize was offered by the casting of lots. These had a long record in the history of religion and were often associated with charitable activities. In the 15th century, a number of towns in the Low Countries held public lotteries to raise funds for town fortifications and other works, as evidenced by records from Ghent, Utrecht, Bruges and elsewhere. The term “lottery” comes from the Dutch noun lot (“fate” or “destiny”), which itself is derived from the root lot, meaning fate, or the casting of lots for something: the fortunes of men and nations are decided by lot, and so is the location of an estate.
Today’s state-sponsored lotteries usually offer a wide range of games, including instant-win scratch-off tickets and daily games in which bettors choose numbers from one to 50. Most states also hold a large national lottery. In addition, there are a number of private companies that offer games similar to the ones run by states.
Although state lotteries are not required to be fair, they must meet certain minimum standards. These include the use of a random number generator to select winners; the publication of winning tickets and jackpots; a system for verifying tickets and stakes; and a mechanism for recording the selection of winning numbers. A lottery is also required to have a mechanism for collecting and pooling all the money placed as stakes in the competition. In some lotteries, this is accomplished through the use of a chain of sales agents who pass stakes paid by bettor up through the organization until they are banked.
A state’s decision to establish a lottery often depends on how much the politicians want to spend and how willing voters are to pay for that spending. Lotteries are an attractive source of revenue for state governments because they involve a voluntary expenditure by players and thus avoid the political problems associated with raising taxes. The state, however, must carefully balance the desire for lottery revenues with the need to protect its citizens’ financial security.
