Lottery is a form of gambling that gives participants the opportunity to win a prize by chance. The process can be applied to a variety of situations, such as the selection of winners for a sporting event among equally competing players, the allocation of units in a housing complex, or the placements of students in schools or universities. The prize fund may be a fixed amount of money or goods. It is more common, however, to award a percentage of the total ticket sales after expenses and taxes are deducted.

Several of the colonies held public lotteries to raise funds for the Revolutionary War, and private lottery games were widely used in England and America. The Continental Congress voted in 1776 to establish a national lottery to support American colleges, which it later discarded as ineffective. But smaller public lotteries continued to be widely regarded as “painless” ways of raising tax revenues, and they helped finance such American colleges as Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, King’s College (now Columbia), Union, and William and Mary.

The main argument supporting the legalization of state lotteries has been that they provide a way for people to spend their own money voluntarily and thereby contribute to society without having to impose direct taxation. Lotteries have been criticized for encouraging addictive gambling behavior and having a regressive effect on low-income households. However, the vast majority of lottery players are not addicted to gambling, and most who play do not lose large amounts of their incomes.