Lottery (plural lotteries) is an arrangement in which people pay money to enter and names are drawn for prizes, primarily cash. It is a form of gambling and is regulated by many governments. Often, the winners of a lottery are chosen by chance, but some prizes may be awarded for skills or performance. Some lotteries are organized by state governments and others are privately run.
Although making decisions and determining fates by casting lots has a long history in human culture (including several instances recorded in the Bible), the modern public lotteries are comparatively recent in origin. The first state-controlled lotteries were introduced in the US and elsewhere around 1964, but their establishment was preceded by a number of private ones. Private lotteries allowed wealthy individuals to raise large sums of money by betting against the government and were one of the primary sources of capital for government projects.
In the early American colonies, Benjamin Franklin held a lottery to raise funds for cannons to defend Philadelphia from the British. George Washington participated in a private lottery to alleviate his crushing debts, and rare tickets bearing his signature became collector’s items.
Most states established their own lotteries in the late 1960s, and the majority of them now have multiple games. Despite the fact that different states had very different reasons for adopting lotteries, their evolutions have followed remarkably similar patterns: The state legislates a monopoly; establishes a governmental agency or public corporation to run the lottery, rather than licensing a private firm in return for a share of revenues; begins operations with a modest number of relatively simple games; and, driven by constant pressure to increase revenue, progressively expands the number and complexity of games, often with little or no general overview.