procedure for distributing something (usually money or prizes) among a group of people by lot or by chance. The type of lottery considered here is a form of gambling in which many people purchase chances, called lottery tickets, and the winning tickets are drawn from a pool composed of all tickets sold (sweepstakes) or offered for sale, or consisting of all of or most of the possible permutations of the numbers or symbols used on the tickets. The total value of the prizes is commonly the amount remaining after expenses—including the profits for the promoter, the costs of promotion, and the taxes or other revenues—have been deducted from the pool, though in some lotteries the number and value of prizes are predetermined and the profits for the promoter depend on the number of tickets sold. In most large-scale lotteries, a very large prize is offered along with many smaller ones. Lotteries have a very wide appeal as a means for raising money; they are simple to organize, easy to play, and popular with the general public.

The practice of determining the distribution of property by lot is traceable to ancient times. Among dozens of biblical examples is one in the Old Testament (Numbers 26:55–56) that has the Lord instructing Moses to take a census of the people of Israel and to divide the land among them by lot. Roman emperors such as Nero and Augustus used lotteries to give away property and slaves during Saturnalian feasts and other entertainments. A popular dinner entertainment in ancient Rome was the apophoreta (Greek: “that which is carried home”), in which the host distributed pieces of wood with symbols on them and then toward the end of the evening had a drawing for prizes that the guests took home. Modern lotteries of a similar type include those used for military conscription, commercial promotions in which property is given away by a random procedure, and the selection of jury members from lists of registered voters. Under the strict definition of a gambling type of lottery, however, payment of a consideration (property, work, or money) must be made for a chance of receiving the prize.

The first European lotteries in the modern sense of the word appeared in 15th-century Burgundy and Flanders with towns attempting to raise money to fortify defenses or aid the poor. Francis I of France permitted the establishment of lotteries for private and public profit in several cities between 1520 and 1539. Possibly the first European public lottery to award money prizes was the ventura, held from 1476 in the Italian city-state of Modena under the auspices of the ruling d'Este family (see House of Este (Este, House of)). However, the lottery that came to serve as a model was the Genoa lottery. This was such a successful enterprise (in spite of resistance from the Roman Catholic Church) that the practice quickly spread to other Italian (Italy) cities and elsewhere. When the Italian nation was united, its first national lottery was created in 1863, with regular (weekly) drawings organized for the purpose of providing income for the state. Lotto, the Italian National Lottery, is regarded as the basis for such modern gambling games as policy, the numbers game, keno, bingo, and lotto.

Queen Elizabeth I chartered a general lottery in England in 1566 to raise money for repairing harbours and other public purposes. In 1612 the Virginia Company obtained permission from King James I for a lottery to help in financing the settlement of Jamestown in the New World. While several lotteries organized by the company did not erase a desperate need for funds, and although businessmen in some English towns complained of difficulties related to them, lotteries were nevertheless thought to be the “first and most certaine” way to obtain funds. Lotteries accounted for almost half of the yearly income of the company by 1621, when, as a result of bitter dissension within the company itself, the company's lotteries were finally prohibited by the House of Commons (Commons, House of). In 1627 a series of lotteries were licensed to raise money for the building of an aqueduct for London, and, in fact, except for a ban from 1699 to 1709, lotteries were held in England until 1826.

Some important problems developed in the manner of conducting lotteries in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. For most of that period, lotteries were the only form of organized gambling available to the people. They were intensively advertised by such promotions as torchlight processions in the streets. Contractors would often manage to purchase tickets at less than the standard prices for subsequent resale at excessive markups, and a type of side bet called insurance—a small wager that a ticket would or would not be drawn in the regular lottery—was popularized. The state could not derive revenues from either of the latter two practices, but dishonest private operators could. Also, it was claimed that lotteries encouraged mass gambling and that drawings were fraudulent. Their abuses strengthened the arguments of those in opposition to lotteries and weakened their defenders, but, before they were outlawed in 1826, the government and licensed promoters had used lotteries for all or portions of the financing of such projects as the building of the British Museum, the repair of bridges, and many projects in the American colonies, such as supplying a battery of guns for the defense of Philadelphia and rebuilding Faneuil Hall in Boston.

The Continental Congress in 1776 voted to establish a lottery to try to raise funds for the American Revolution. The scheme was abandoned, but, over the next 30 years, the practice continued of holding smaller public lotteries, which were seen as mechanisms for obtaining “voluntary taxes” and helped build several American colleges (university): Harvard (Harvard University), Dartmouth (Dartmouth College), Yale (Yale University), King's College (now Columbia (Columbia University)), William and Mary (William and Mary, College of), Union (Union College), and Brown (Brown University). Privately organized lotteries also were common in England (United Kingdom) and the United States as means to sell products or properties for more money than could be obtained from a regular sale. By 1832 lotteries had become very popular indeed; the Boston Mercantile Journal reported that 420 had been held the previous year in eight states.

Abuses by private organizers continued, however, and once again voices of opposition began to dominate. In 1827 postmasters and their assistants were barred from selling lottery tickets. Most of the states began legislating antilottery laws. In 1868 Congress (Congress of the United States) declared it unlawful to use the mail for letters or circulars concerning lotteries “or other similar enterprises on any pretext whatever.” The opinion of the Supreme Court (Supreme Court of the United States) in 1878 held lotteries to have “a demoralizing influence upon the people.”

The postal rules did not have an immediate effect in eliminating lotteries; the most successful lottery in the United States was organized in Louisiana in 1869 and ran continuously for 25 years. Agents for the Louisiana Lottery were located in every city in the United States: the total sales per month were $2,000,000 at its peak; monthly drawings generated prizes up to $250,000, and twice-yearly prizes could go as high as $600,000. In 1890 President Benjamin Harrison (Harrison, Benjamin) and Congress agreed in condemning lotteries as “swindling and demoralizing agencies” and prohibited the interstate transportation of lottery tickets. The Louisiana Lottery, the last state lottery in the United States until 1963, was killed, but not until it had acquired both enormous profits for its (private) promoters and a reputation for bribery and corruption.

The history of lotteries in several European countries was roughly similar to those of England and the United States but not to that of Italy. In France lotteries became increasingly popular after their introduction by Francis I in the 1500s. Their general appeal lasted until the 17th century, when Louis XIV and several members of his court managed to win the top prizes in a drawing—an event that generated some suspicion and resulted in the king's returning the money for redistribution. French lotteries were abolished in 1836. Almost a century later (1933) a new Loterie Nationale was established; it closed just before World War II and later reopened.

In the 1930s the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstakes (Irish Sweepstakes) was established and a pattern set for the highly organized lotteries of the 20th century. The pattern of the sweepstakes, however, was not very different from the state lotteries of Georgian England or 19th-century Europe.

The basic elements of lotteries are usually quite simple. First, there must be some means of recording the identities of the bettors, the amounts staked by each, and the number(s) or other symbols on which the money is bet. The bettor may write his name on a ticket that is deposited with the lottery organization for subsequent shuffling and possible selection in the drawing. Or the bettor may buy a numbered receipt in the knowledge that this number will be entered into a pool of numbers, the bettor having the responsibility of determining later if his ticket was among the winners. Many modern lotteries are run with the aid of computers, which record each bettor's selected number(s) or randomly generated number(s). Generally, bettors are responsible for determining later if they hold a winning ticket, although sometimes the buyers' identities are recorded, and payment for winning tickets may be directly deposited in the bettors' bank accounts. Another procedure requires only that the bettor inform a representative of the lottery which number, usually up to three digits, he guesses will be drawn, and the representative is trusted to appear later with the prize, if any is won. This is the usual procedure in the numbers game, which has been popular for several decades in most large U.S. cities. The numbers game is defined in U.S. state laws as an illegal lottery. Bolita, a lottery similar to policy, is played in Puerto Rico and, in the United States, among Cuban and Puerto Rican groups. The drawing is of one numbered ball from a sack of balls numbered 1 to 100.

A second element of all lotteries is the drawing, a procedure for determining the winning numbers or symbols. This may take the form of a pool or collection of tickets or their counterfoils from which the winners are extracted. The tickets must first be thoroughly mixed by some mechanical means, such as shaking or tossing; this is a randomizing procedure designed to ensure that chance and only chance determines the selection of winners. Computers have increasingly come into use for this purpose because of their capacity for storing information about large numbers of tickets and also for generating random winning numbers. In lotteries where the bettors themselves are allowed to select their own numbers, this may mean that several tickets with the right combination of winning numbers have been sold—in which case the prize is divided among the winners—or, conversely, that no such ticket has been sold. The usual procedure in the latter case is to transfer the amount of the win to the next drawing (called jackpot, or rollover), increasing the size of the top prize or prizes. In this manner very substantial amounts can eventually be paid out.

Promoters of public, especially of large-scale, lotteries may exploit the opportunity to make the drawing and mixing process as colourful and dramatic as possible. The drawings held by the Irish Sweepstakes until it ceased operation in 1987 could be combined with horse racing. In that lottery two drawings were held, one to identify winning numbers and another to associate those numbers with the names of horses entered in a major race; the success of the individual horses then determined the final order of the prizes.

A third element common to all lotteries is the existence of a mechanism for collecting and pooling all the money placed as stakes. This is usually accomplished by a hierarchy of sales agents who pass money paid for the tickets up through the organization until it is “banked.” A practice common in many national lotteries is to divide tickets into fractions, usually tenths. Each fraction, if and when it is sold separately, costs slightly more than its share of the total cost of an entire ticket. Many agents then buy whole tickets—in effect at a premium or discounted price—for marketing in the streets, where customers can place relatively small stakes on the fractions. In a large-scale lottery, either a computer system is used for recording purchases and printing tickets in retail shops, or the use of the regular mail system is desirable for communicating information and transporting tickets and stakes. In the United States and some other countries, however, postal rules prohibit use of the mails. Postal prohibitions apply also to international mailings of lotteries. Though post-office authorities are diligent, it is clear that much smuggling and other violation of interstate and international regulations occur.

A fourth requirement is a set of rules determining the frequencies and sizes of the prizes. Costs of organizing and promoting the lotteries must be deducted from the pool, and a percentage normally goes as revenues and profits to the state or sponsor. Of the remainder available for the winners, a decision must be made concerning the balance between few large prizes or many smaller ones. Potential bettors seem to be attracted to lotteries that offer very large prizes, as evidenced by the fact that ticket sales increase dramatically for rollover drawings, but in some cultures they also demand a chance to win smaller prizes (which typically are wagered again in the next round). Authorities on lotteries disagree about which of these choices is better for the welfare of the people and the economic success of the lottery. The amount of the pool returned to the bettors tends to be between 40 and 60 percent. The numbers game usually returns slightly more than 50 percent to winners.

State lotteries or licensed large-scale private ones are common in many African and Middle Eastern states, nearly all European and Latin American countries, Australia, Japan, and several countries on the Asian mainland. The list also includes most U.S. states. Communist countries attempted for a few decades to reject public gambling institutions as decadent and anti-Marxist, but later only privately organized gambling was in disfavour.

Australia, however, has been called the real home of the state lottery. New South Wales, which had lotteries as early as 1849, has one of the largest, with sales of more than one million tickets a week; it has financed, among other things, the spectacular Sydney Opera House. New South Wales also raffles houses, cars, and other prizes on a scale unequaled anywhere else.

The “classic” lotteries, with preprinted numbers or symbols on the tickets, steadily lost ground during the second half of the 20th century to lotteries in which the bettors could choose their own numbers (from an acceptable pool)—primarily lotto, which, at the start of the 21st century, was the leading form of lottery in the world, with an annual total turnover in excess of $150 billion. Because of their controversial nature, national lotteries (as well as many other forms of gambling) are exempt from European Union laws that otherwise permit the free offering and transportation of goods and services across national borders. Lotteries on the Internet, however, are a growing threat to this policy; the first such game to be offered to the general public was the Interlotto, introduced in 1995 from Liechtenstein (from 1997 under the name PLUS Lotto). New technologies have also enabled lotteries in other forms, such as scratch tickets (“instant lotteries”) and video-lottery terminals.