A competition based on chance, in which numbered tickets are sold and prizes are given to those whose numbers are drawn at random. Lotteries are often sponsored by states or other organizations as a way of raising funds.
Although the lottery may seem like a modern invention, it has a long history. It has been used to finance everything from the Great Wall of China to Roman military campaigns, and it was especially popular in America during the nineteenth century when state budgets grew unwieldy and it became impossible to balance the books without raising taxes or cutting services.
To meet gambling laws, a lottery must have three things: it must use random selection to determine the winner; it must have a prize fund that is at least equal to the total amount of money collected; and it must be run as a public service. The latter two requirements are particularly important. Because lottery proceeds are public funds, governments must be careful not to promote gambling and risk running afoul of the law.
A typical lottery operates in the following manner: It establishes a government-owned, non-profit entity to run the lottery; begins operations with a small number of relatively simple games; and, in response to continuing pressure for additional revenues, progressively adds new games. The result is a game that is not only highly lucrative for the lottery operator but also highly addictive to participants. This pattern is reflected in the figure below, which shows how the distribution of winning applications changes over time as the number of available games increases.