‘Wire’, ‘cup’, ‘lyre’, ‘umbrella’, ‘table’, ‘hopper’ and ‘trumpet’ are some of the terms that millions of Spaniards hear every December 22 on the occasion of the Extraordinary Draw of Christmas, the most important and popular of the Lottery.
Since December 2019, nine words from the Lottery lexicon were added to the update of the XXIII edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Language (DLE), after being approved by the academies that make up the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE). .
Likewise, terms like ‘chapel’ or ‘postero/ra’linked to the popular National Lottery for more than two centuries, also appear. According to the dictionary, ‘Wire’ is, “in the lottery of some countries, each of the wires on which, once extracted from the drum, the balls of the winning numbers and those of their corresponding prizes are strung.”
For its part, the definition of ‘Chapel’, in relation to the Spanish lottery, “final model of a tenth or a ticket, on which a draw number is not yet printed”; while the ‘Cup’ is that “wide and transparent container, in the shape of a cup, where the ball that comes out of the bass drum falls after sliding down the trumpet.” In the case of the ‘Lira’, the meaning of the dictionary indicates that it is the “device made up of ten metal rods where the balls are arranged after counting and checking them before placing them in the drum” and adds that, in the Christmas Lottery, “there are a total of 200 liras, each containing 500 balls.”
Regarding the ‘Umbrella’it is about “the circular structure from which hang the lyres that contain all the number balls in play”while the ‘Postero, ra’ is the “person who was in charge of a lottery stand” and the ‘Table’ is the “exhibitor or board on which the balls of the winning numbers and those of their corresponding prizes are shown.” The ‘Hopper’ It is, for its part, the container or deposit open at the bottom, generally in the shape of a truncated pyramid or inverted cone, which is used to meter the passage of something such as grains, coins, balls, fertilizers, liquids, etc. and, “in the lottery of some countries, a transparent funnel-shaped container that is used to pass the balls with the numbers in play from the lira to the drum.”
The ‘Trumpet’ It is the funnel or channel through which the balls slide from the bass drum to the cup. Other relevant terminology, related to elements of the Extraordinary Christmas Draw, would be the ‘Bill’, ‘Balls’, ‘Drums or ‘Series’. Thus, the ‘Ticket’ matches the series for a given number. This draw consists of 185 series, that is, 185 tickets are issued for each number. As for the ‘Balls’, there are two different types: those with numbers, which are 100,000, and 1,807, corresponding to the prizes.
All of them are made of boxwood, with the same weight and size (3 grams and 18 millimeters) and have the numbers and letters engraved with laser. The Christmas Draw is celebrated by the traditional system in which two ‘Bombos’ are used, one for prizes and the other for numbers; and the series are the set formed by one ticket of each number that participates in the draw, that is, each series consists of 100,000 tickets.