A lottery is a contest with a random chance of winning. It can be any kind of competition with a limited number of winners, from a school selection process to the awarding of units in a subsidized housing complex. A lottery can also be an activity regarded as having an outcome dependent on fate: a soldier’s combat duty can be described as a lottery (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition).

Lotteries have long raised money for a variety of public uses. In colonial America, for instance, lotteries were used to finance roads, libraries, churches, colleges, canals, and bridges. They were popular and hailed as a painless form of taxation.

The basic elements of a lottery are a system for recording the identities and amounts staked by bettors and a method of selecting winners. The latter can be achieved by random drawing or by shuffling the ticket numbers. The first requires a means of identifying the bettors, either through an identity card or through a special receipt. The receipts may contain the bettor’s name, a unique identification number, or a combination of symbols.

To protect against fraud and corruption, the tickets are printed with coded numbers on both sides. They are coated with an opaque covering that makes it difficult to read the numbers, and they are imprinted with confusing patterns. Additional security features are used to prevent candling, delamination, and wicking. Some of these include a heavy foil coating, printing matching codes on the back and front of the ticket, or an ink that glows in a certain color when exposed to ultraviolet light.