lottery
part of speech
noun (a lottery, lotteries)
meaning for a pupil
1) A lottery is a game where people buy numbered tickets and winners are picked by chance to get money or prizes. tree →
2) A lottery is any situation decided by luck: «Getting a place at that school is a lottery.» tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths lessons on probability the lottery shows that the chance of winning is tiny because there are millions of possible outcomes. In everyday life adults buy lottery tickets; children are too young to play. Phrases: win the lottery, lottery ticket, it's a lottery.
examples
- He won a small prize on the lottery. tree →
- The chance of winning the lottery is less than one in a million. tree →
- You must be an adult to buy a lottery ticket. tree →
- Some lottery money goes to good causes. tree →
- Choosing the winner was a lottery. tree →
- If 1,000 tickets are sold and you have 1, your chance is 1 in 1,000. tree →
- The lottery collector pressed me so hard that I thought I should crack. tree →
note
Countable; plural lotteries (y → ies). Related: raffle (a small lottery, e.g. at a school fair), draw. Myth: numbers that have not come up for a while are «due» — every draw is just as random. In maths: chance of winning = your tickets ÷ all tickets.
In the corpora
- A scratch card is a quick lottery ticket; the "almost won" feeling is designed to make people buy another.
- On average people get back less money from scratch cards and lotteries than they spend; that is how lotteries make money.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «lottery» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.