1682 London Gaz. No. 1773/4 A newly invented Lottery, under the name of the Riffling or Raffling Lottery.

1684 London Gaz. No. 1950/4 To keep Rafflings, Ordinaries, and other publick Games.

1693 T. Southerne Maids Last Prayer ii. i You have so many rafflings, and whoever throws most you win the prize.

1716 J. Addison Freeholder No. 11. ⁋4 Never was a Subscription for a Raffling or an Opera more crowded.

1779 F. Burney Let. 10 Oct. (1994) III. 360 The chief Diversion..seems to be Raffling, & the chief object for the Raffles..is Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

1851 H. Mayhew London Labour I. 371/2 The most lucrative part of the trade is in the raffling.

1882 N. Amer. Rev. Aug. 164 The raffling at fairs owes its popularity to the success that attends every kind of appeal to this irrational propensity, and to the incessant demand for nervous excitation.

1903 Atlanta (Georgia) Constit. 20 Dec. 5/6 The announcement of the intention of the grand jury to consider raffling as gambling, and prosecute accordingly, will make a sensation.

1945 F. A. Sweet Hudson River School 14 Since the tickets sold slowly, the actual raffling of these pictures did not take place until October 23.

1991 Amer. Square Dance May 92/2 Some clubs have used the tactic of raffling.

1691 R. Ames Islington-Wells 11 Some to the Raffling-shop advance, To see the strange effects of Chance.

1749 T. Nugent Grand Tour I. 253 About the pumps..there are raffling shops, coffee-houses, and all other diversions.

1845 N.Y. Herald 9 Nov. 2/6 Winter has brought with it many concomitant evils, the most serious and aggravated of which are the numerous raffling shops which are brought into existence, under the shallow pretext of giving working men and mechanics chances of procuring poultry ‘very cheap’.

1903 A. M. Earle Two Cent. Costume Amer. (1968) II. xv. 396 Lotteries flourished in the American provinces. It was a wonderful zest to shopping to do it through lottery tickets... Raffling-shops were in every city.

1951 W. W. Addison Eng. Spas 49 Hampstead's raffling-shop is said to have been set up by a lawyer as an ‘easier way of conveyancing and alienating estates from one family to another’.

1768 Ware's Compl. Body Archit. (new ed.) iii. iii. 384 The raffling of the leaves, and dividing them by the laurel or olive compartition,..would have a look of great elegance.

1817 T. Rickman Attempt to discriminate Styles Eng. Archit. 26 The best examples have all some trifling difference, principally in the raffling of the leaves.

1852 E. Lomax & T. Gunyon Nicholson's Encycl. Archit. I. 204/2 This process being only a preliminary, though necessary step to the raffling of the leaves, the general contours, thus found, must be rubbed out.

1913 T. G. Jackson Byzantine & Romanesque Archit. II. 104 There is no trace of Byzantine feeling in the leaves, which have the deep channelled folds, the piping and the rounded raffling of the Roman type.