A lottery is a form of gambling in which numbers are drawn to determine the winner. The prize money is usually cash. Some states also award prizes like cars, houses, and college tuition. The earliest known lottery dates back to ancient times. It appears in dozens of biblical passages and in Roman entertainments such as the Saturnalian feasts, where guests were given pieces of wood with symbols on them for a drawing to decide who would receive the prizes offered during the meal.

Scratch-off games are the bread and butter of lottery commissions, making up 60 to 65 percent of total sales. They are also the most regressive form of lottery play, because the poorest players spend a larger share of their income on them. Other games, like Powerball and Mega Millions, are less regressive. But they do not reach the bottom quintile of incomes, which is where most people who play lotto games come from.

Lotteries have been popular since the Middle Ages, and were used in colonial America to raise money for a variety of public projects. They were viewed as painless forms of taxation, and Alexander Hamilton wrote that they could help “persuade the people to hazard trifling sums for the opportunity of winning considerable gain.” The word lottery is likely derived from Dutch lotinge, meaning “action of drawing lots”, which itself may be a calque on Middle French loterie, from the Old Dutch lot “fate” or “luck”. In the United States, private and state-run lotteries have raised tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves and their beneficiaries.