Official lottery is a state-sponsored form of gambling in which numbers are drawn to determine winners, often for cash or goods. The organizers of a lottery can either risk their own money in a fixed prize pool or choose to share the profits with their players. A large number of countries have lotteries. In addition, the concept has spread to other commercial products such as scratch-off tickets and video-lottery terminals.

Historically, lottery games were often a means of raising public funds for civic projects. In colonial America, for example, lotteries helped fund roads, libraries, churches, canals, and even local militias. Lottery revenue also subsidized private enterprise. In the fourteen hundred and fifteen-hundreds, the practice reached the Low Countries, where a variety of lotteries were organized to raise funds for everything from townsfolk to the king’s treasury.

Modern lotteries began in the nineteen-sixties, when state governments found themselves running out of ways to balance their budgets without resorting to onerous taxes on middle and working class people. The postwar period had been a time of relative prosperity and generous social safety nets. But with soaring inflation and the cost of the Vietnam War, that arrangement started to unravel.

State officials figured that if people were going to gamble anyway, the government might as well get in on the action. So the states jumped in, and in so doing created a whole new generation of gamblers. The state-run lotteries make billions of dollars a year, but they are a drop in the bucket compared to total state revenue.