Lottery is a gambling game in which people pay to play for money or prizes based on chance. The prize may be anything from a house or car to college tuition or a vacation. In the United States, most states operate state-run lotteries with different games and prize options. In addition, some cities run their own lotteries, such as those offering subsidized housing units or kindergarten placements. Some people also use lottery money to fund other public uses, such as parks and libraries.

There are several elements common to all lotteries: a drawing, a pool of tickets or counterfoils from which winners are selected, and some means of recording the identities of the bettors and the amounts staked by each. Most modern lotteries have a computer system that records the bettors and their selections, then generates winning numbers or symbols by random processes. The computers make it possible to conduct large and frequent drawings with much faster processing speeds than by hand.

The number of winners in a lottery depends on the size of the jackpot and how many tickets are sold. Typically, a percentage of the total prize pool is returned to the bettors—between 40 and 60 percent for a cash or numbers game.

To keep ticket sales strong, most states must offer a respectable portion of the prize pool in order to attract bettors. This reduces the proportion of the overall revenue that is available to state governments for things like education. This implicit tax, which is not collected in the same way as a state income tax, makes it difficult to distinguish lottery revenues from other state funds.