Lottery is an activity or event whose outcome depends on chance: It’s considered to be a lottery when the winner of a race or other competition is selected by drawing lots. Also used:

The earliest lotteries began in the fourteen-hundreds, when various towns held public drawings to raise money for town fortifications and charity for the poor. In the sixteenth century, a royal charter authorized the first national lottery.

As time went on, states looked for ways to fund public services without enraging their anti-tax electorates, and they stumbled onto the solution of running a lottery. In the late twentieth century, the lottery became the nation’s main source of state revenue.

In the United States, all lotteries are regulated by federal and state laws and must be audited or supervised by 3rd parties such as Price Waterhouse or Cooper to ensure they’re fair to all players. Lottery prizes are randomly chosen from the pool of tickets and counterfoils by mechanical means such as shaking or tossing or, more recently, computer programs.

The amount of money you win if you win the lottery can be awarded either in a lump sum or in regular payments over time. The lump sum option allows you to receive the entire aggregate prize in one giant sum up front, but it comes with the drawback that the full amount is subject to income taxes (both federal and state). Normally, a percentage of the total prize pool goes to organizers, expenses, and profits, while the remainder is available for winners.