A lottery is an arrangement by which prizes are awarded through a process that depends entirely on chance. A prize pool is accumulated from money bet on the outcome of a drawing, with a portion going to the costs and profits of organizing and promoting the lottery. From the remainder, some percentage is typically allocated to the winners. The word lottery is derived from the Dutch noun lot, meaning fate or destiny. In the story, Old Man Warner, a conservative force in the village, explains why they conduct the lottery by quoting an old proverb, “Lottery in June, corn will be heavy soon.”
The setting of The Lottery serves as a metaphor for society at large, where harmful traditions and customs persist despite their inherent injustice or cruelty. Tessie Hutchinson’s plight is a powerful example of this phenomenon, and Jackson uses her character to emphasize the importance of questioning established practices and refusing to accept blind conformity.
The basic elements of a lottery are a mechanism for recording the identities and amounts staked by each bettor, and a system for shuffling and selecting winning tickets. In addition to these fundamentals, modern lotteries may employ a number of other technical and administrative measures to prevent cheating and fraud. For example, a ticket can be printed with a unique serial number or symbol on both sides. Some tickets can also be folded into multiple layers, with a hidden layer of numbers that is scanned by the scanning device to reveal the winning numbers.