Lottery is a game of chance in which participants pay a small sum for the opportunity to win a prize. While many people play for the big jackpot, there are some who use the money to help others. The concept of a lottery is older than the written word, with the first known drawing taking place in the Roman Empire as part of dinner parties and other entertainment events. Prizes were often fancy items like dinnerware and other goods, but eventually the games began to involve cash.

The earliest recorded lotteries offering tickets with prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century, though town records from Ghent, Utrecht and Bruges show that they may be even older. Benjamin Franklin organized several lotteries to raise funds to buy cannons for the city of Philadelphia, and George Washington’s Mountain Road Lottery in 1768 offered land and slaves as prizes.

A lottery requires some means of recording the identities of bettors and the amounts they stake, as well as a mechanism for drawing lots or selecting winners. In the simplest lottery, a person purchases a ticket numbered by the lottery organizer and is then given the opportunity to win if that number is drawn. In a more sophisticated lottery, the bettor writes his name and a chosen symbol on a receipt which is then inserted into a large pool from which winning numbers are drawn.