1. a gambling game in which numbered tickets are sold and some of them, chosen by chance, win prizes.
The word lottery has been in use for centuries, but it became popular in the United States in the 1970s. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry in which people try to make money by chance. The odds of winning are very low, and most people who play lose money. The game is often criticized as an example of bad economics and of people wasting money, but there are also many people who say they are playing for fun or believe that if they can win the big prize, their lives will be improved.
a system for allocating prizes by chance among persons purchasing tickets; the correspondingly numbered slips, or lots, are drawn from a container on a day previously announced in connection with the scheme of distribution.
State governments sponsor the lotteries, and they claim a legal monopoly over them. The profits are used to fund various state government programs. Supporters of the games argue that they are a painless alternative to raising taxes. Opponents charge that they rely on a faulty argument: namely, that people are going to gamble anyway, so the government might as well capture this behavior for the good of the state. In fact, enticing people to gamble can actually increase state revenues, but the soaring numbers of people who play the lottery can have the opposite effect: it increases the percentage of the population that is addicted to gambling and creates new generations of compulsives.