A gambling game or method of raising money, as for some public charitable purpose, in which a large number of tickets are sold and a drawing is held for certain prizes. Often, the winners are chosen by random chance. A lottery is a form of gambling, and its existence at the state level often raises ethical issues. State governments often have difficulty managing an activity that they themselves profit from, and many are pressured to increase the size of the prize pools in order to attract new players and keep existing ones.
The word lottery comes from the Middle Dutch lotere, itself a calque on the Middle French word loterie, meaning “action of drawing lots”. Making decisions and determining fates by casting lots has a long history (and several cases in the Bible), but lotteries as a means for material gain are of relatively recent origin. During the 17th century, it was common in Europe to hold public lotteries to raise funds for a variety of purposes, and they became very popular. They were widely regarded as a painless form of taxation, and even George Washington sponsored a lottery in 1768 to help finance his expedition against the French.
Modern lotteries are generally run by state government agencies that create and administer games, select retailers, train them to sell and redeem tickets, pay top-tier prizes, and assist the retailers in promoting the lottery. A key element of the lottery is a random selection of winners, and computer programs have increasingly been used to ensure that the results of a drawing are truly random. Many lotteries publish statistics after the draw, and this data is useful in analyzing a lottery’s unbiasedness.
