In a lottery, players purchase tickets for a draw of numbers or other symbols. If their ticket matches those drawn, they win the prize money. The first such lotteries were probably held in the Low Countries in the 15th century to raise money for town fortifications and help the poor. They became very popular and widely spread in Europe; a drawing held on 9 May 1445 at Ghent raised funds for walls, houses, and bridges. Lotteries were also used by the French crown to raise money for a variety of purposes, including public works and military operations. Benjamin Franklin sponsored an unsuccessful public lottery to help fund the American Revolution, and Thomas Jefferson used a private lottery to relieve his crushing debts. The lottery was a popular mechanism for raising money in the United States as well, and public lotteries provided an important source of funds to build many American colleges—including Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, King’s College (now Columbia), William and Mary, Union, and Brown—in the 19th century.
Most people who play the lottery do so because they simply like gambling. They buy the tickets because they think their odds of winning are long, even though there is a greater likelihood that they will be struck by lightning or become a billionaire than that they will win a major prize in a state lottery. They often spend a lot of time and money on playing, and they have all sorts of quote-unquote “systems” for buying tickets.