The official lottery is the process of distributing money or prizes to people by lot. The prize amount can be small (like a free ticket to the state fair) or large (such as a lump sum of money). The term may also refer to a specific type of gambling game, such as Powerball, Mega Millions, and SuperLotto Plus. Lotteries have a long history in the United States, where they have raised funds for public projects. For example, the British Museum and many bridges were funded by lotteries in the seventeenth century, and the first American colony to establish a lottery used the proceeds to build a battery of guns for defense in Philadelphia and rebuild Faneuil Hall in Boston.

The modern lottery is run by a government agency and has become the most popular form of gambling in America. The games are marketed and regulated by the state where they are offered. There are no national lotteries, but consortiums of state lotteries offer games that cover larger geographic areas and have bigger jackpots.

In the early days, state lotteries marketed their products by touting how much they were helping to fund public services. These campaigns were extraordinarily effective, but they were also fundamentally misleading. For one thing, they wildly inflated the impact of lottery revenues on state budgets. In reality, lottery profits cover, at most, five per cent of the cost of education in California. Moreover, the marketing of state lotteries often targets low income communities and leads them to believe that winning the lottery is a way to quickly build wealth.