A game in which tickets are sold and the winners are determined by drawing lots. Lottery is often used to raise money for public-works projects, schools, and charity, but it can also be played for sports events and other competitions. It can be a form of gambling, but its rules and prizes are usually much more structured than those of regular games of chance. Lottery is also a common way to determine job assignments, such as the division of work among staff members or the selection of students to attend a specific school.
A lottery is typically run by a government agency or private organization with the objective of raising funds for a particular purpose. The organization may also use the money to promote social programs or political causes. In the United States, state governments are monopolies on lottery operations, and they use their profits to fund various state programs.
The word lottery comes from the Middle Dutch Loterie, a calque on the Middle French loterie. It was first recorded in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with towns holding public lotteries to raise money for town walls and fortifications, and for poor relief.
A basic requirement of a lottery is a way to record the identities of bettors and their amounts staked. In older forms of the game, a bettor might write his name on a ticket and deposit it with the organizer for later shuffling and selecting from a pool of numbers. In modern lotteries, a computer records each bettor’s number(s), and a random selection is made from those numbers. A plot of this data might look like the one below, with each color indicating the number of times an application row received that position.