A lottery is a game of chance in which participants pay money for the opportunity to win a prize. It’s an ancient pastime, attested to in the Bible and Roman history (Nero loved them), and it is still popular today. It can be as simple as picking numbers or as complex as a multi-stage competition with varying degrees of skill involved. Regardless of the structure, it relies on chance and has an extremely low probability of winning, as high as finding true love or getting hit by lightning.
In the United States, all state lotteries are government-controlled monopolies that don’t allow private companies to compete with them; profits are used solely for public works and services. The games can be as small as picking a set of numbers or as large as a multimillion-dollar jackpot. But in general, they follow the same pattern: a state legitimises and controls the lottery; hires or establishes a state agency to run it (and thus a monopoly on the business); starts out with a few modestly simple games; and then, as demand grows, progressively adds new ones.
In the fourteen-hundreds, for instance, a lottery was common in the Low Countries, with profits used for everything from town fortifications to charity. By the seventeen-hundreds, it had spread to England and into America, even though Protestants strictly forbade gambling. Proponents argued that if people were going to gamble anyway, why not let the government pocket the profits?