Lottery Trivia
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100 free Lottery trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lotteries are older than most countries. Keno slips from Han-dynasty China, Roman dinner-party raffles, a 1569 English draw that came with immunity from arrest, and colonial lotteries that paid for Princeton and Columbia all came long before anyone scratched a ticket at a gas station. This quiz covers that whole story, plus the modern games people actually play: Powerball, Mega Millions, the UK National Lottery, EuroMillions and Spain's El Gordo. You'll get questions on record jackpots and who won them, how the odds really work, why the Dutch gave us the word 'lottery', the machine called ERNIE, the Louisiana lottery scandal, and lottery moments from books and film, from Shirley Jackson's short story to Waking Ned Devine. A few numbers questions are in there too, and they are not always the middle option. Difficulty runs from easy to expert, so it works for a pub quiz round, a lottery-night party or just testing yourself. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and related reference pages, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The earliest recorded signs of a lottery are keno slips from which Chinese dynasty?
Han
The slips date to between 205 and 187 BC, and the money is thought to have helped fund projects such as the Great Wall.
Q 02The English word 'lottery' comes from a Dutch word meaning what?
Fate
Lotteries in the Low Countries in the 1400s raised money for town walls and the poor, and were hailed as a painless form of taxation.
Q 03Which country's state lottery, running since 1726, is the oldest still in operation?
Netherlands
Fifteenth-century Low Countries towns already used lotteries to fund town walls and help the poor, and hailed them as painless taxation.
Q 04Modern lotto descends from betting in which Italian city on which five of ninety council members would be drawn?
Genoa
When bettors wanted more than two draws a year, they swapped the candidates' names for numbers and modern lotto was born.
Q 05Which Roman emperor ran the earliest recorded lottery that sold tickets, to fund repairs in Rome?
Augustus
Earlier Roman 'lotteries' were just dinner-party gift draws where every guest won a prize such as fancy dinnerware.
Q 06Which English monarch chartered the first recorded official English lottery in 1566?
Elizabeth I
Every one of the 400,000 tickets won something, and each cost 10 shillings, roughly three weeks' wages for an ordinary citizen.
Q 07What unusual perk did every ticket-holder in England's first official lottery, drawn in 1569, receive?
Immunity from one arrest
The exemption did not cover piracy, murder, felonies or treason; the money went to rebuilding ports and ships for the royal fleet.
Q 08A 1612 English lottery authorized by James I raised money to support which American settlement?
Jamestown
The Virginia Company of London used the proceeds to establish settlers in the first permanent English colony in America.
Q 09Which two Ivy League universities were founded in the 1740s with money raised by lotteries?
Princeton and Columbia
The University of Pennsylvania followed with the Academy Lottery in 1755; more than 200 lotteries were sanctioned in the colonies between 1744 and 1776.
Q 10Benjamin Franklin organized a lottery to buy what for the defense of Philadelphia?
Cannons
Some of these colonial lotteries paid out prizes in Spanish 'pieces of eight'.
Q 11Roughly what did a ticket signed by George Washington from his failed 1768 Mountain Road Lottery fetch in 2007?
$15,000
Washington also managed Bernard Moore's 1769 'Slave Lottery', which advertised land and enslaved people as prizes in the Virginia Gazette.
Q 12Which Frenchman famous for his memoirs helped launch the profitable French state Loterie of 1757?
Giacomo Casanova
He argued the case to Madame de Pompadour and the mathematician d'Alembert; the lottery was created to fund the École militaire.
Q 13A company chartered in 1868 ran the only legal US lottery and became a byword for corruption. Which state hosted it?
Louisiana
Former Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Jubal Early were paid handsomely to preside over the drawings and lend it credibility.
Q 21Which state's lottery admitted responsibility for delaying the record $2.04 billion Powerball drawing by a day?
Minnesota
A technical problem with its communication system held up the security protocols; the draw finally happened at 8:59 the next morning.
Q 22The then-record $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot of January 2016 was split between how many tickets?
3
They were sold in Chino Hills, California; Melbourne Beach, Florida; and Munford, Tennessee, and each was worth $528.8 million.
Q 23Where are Powerball drawings held?
Tallahassee, Florida
Through 2008 they were held in West Des Moines, hosted by Iowa radio personality Mike Pace.
Q 14Which US state launched the first modern state-run lottery in the contiguous United States, in 1964?
New Hampshire
To dodge federal anti-lottery laws, the winning numbers were tied to horse races at Rockingham Park and tickets were sold mostly in state liquor stores.
Q 15Where was the first modern government-run lottery under the US flag established, in 1934?
Puerto Rico
Thirty years passed before any state followed; today 45 states and three territories run lotteries.
Q 16Which five US states do not have a state lottery?
Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah
Nevada's absence is the surprising one: its casino industry has long opposed a state lottery.
Q 17Powerball was born in 1992 as a rebrand of which earlier multi-state game?
Lotto America
It was the first lottery to use two drums, an idea suggested by Steve Caputo of the Oregon Lottery and later copied by Mega Millions and EuroMillions.
Q 18In Powerball, five white balls are drawn from a pool of how many numbers?
69
The red Powerball comes from a separate pool of 26, and each play costs two dollars.
Q 19What are the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot on a single play?
1 in 292 million
Mega Millions is even harder at about 1 in 302.6 million, and Italy's SuperEnalotto is 1 in 622 million.
Q 20The record $2.04 billion Powerball ticket of November 2022 was sold in which California town?
Altadena
Winner Edwin Castro took a lump sum of $997.6 million; Joe's Service Center, which sold the ticket, got a $1 million bonus.
Q 24Mega Millions launched in 1996 under what name?
The Big Game
Its logo still carries six stars for the six founding states: Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Massachusetts and Virginia.
Q 25Mega Millions' add-on that multiplies non-jackpot prizes is called what?
Megaplier
It began as a Texas-only option in 2003, and Texas still owns the trademark; California is the one state that never offered it.
Q 26The record $1.602 billion Mega Millions ticket of August 2023 was bought at a Publix in which state?
Florida
The winner chose the cash option of $794.2 million.
Q 27Where are Mega Millions drawings held?
Atlanta, Georgia
They take place at the studios of WSB-TV, supervised by the Georgia Lottery, on Tuesday and Friday nights.
Q 28Who presented the television programme for the first UK National Lottery draw on 19 November 1994?
Noel Edmonds
The first numbers were 30, 3, 5, 44, 14 and 22 with bonus 10, and seven winners shared a jackpot of just under £5.9 million.
Q 29Which company ran the UK National Lottery from its 1994 launch until 2024?
Camelot
Allwyn Entertainment, part of the Czech KKCG group, took over on 1 February 2024.
Q 30The UK's original Lotto draw machines were named after which legend's characters?
King Arthur
Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere came first; Guinevere is now on display at the Science Museum in London.