Free random name picker. Paste a list, spin, and select one random name fairly for classrooms, giveaways, and prize draws. No sign-up needed.
Tip: click the wheel to spin.
10 names on the wheel.
This picker exists for the situation where one draw is not enough. You have a class, a team or a group, and over a lesson, a meeting or a term everyone should get a turn — not just a random turn each time, but a turn that arrives without anyone being called twice while someone else is never called at all. That is drawing without replacement, and it is what this tool is arranged around.
Type or paste your names into the box, one per line. Press the button and a wheel of ten sample names — replaced by yours — spins for about four seconds and stops on one. The name appears in large type in the middle of the screen. Underneath it are two choices: spin again with everyone still in the pool, or remove that name and spin what is left. Take the second option and the pool shrinks by one, permanently for as long as the page is open, and the same person cannot come up twice.
The names never leave your browser. They are held in the page while you use it, the pick is calculated locally, and the tool makes no network request carrying your list. There is no sign-in and no upload.
The distinction matters more than it sounds, and it is the whole reason this page exists separately from a plain spinning wheel.
| Spin again (with replacement) | Remove and spin (without replacement) | |
|---|---|---|
| Pool after a pick | Unchanged | One name smaller |
| Can the same person be picked twice? | Yes, any number of times | No, not until you add them back |
| Odds per draw on 10 names | 1 in 10 every time | 1 in 10, then 1 in 9, then 1 in 8… |
| After 10 draws | Some names probably never came up | Everyone has been picked exactly once |
| Good for | Spot questions, prize draws, quick decisions | Turn-taking, presentation order, rotas |
The fourth row is the one people are usually surprised by. Picking with replacement from a list of ten, ten times over, does not produce ten different people — some will come up twice or three times and some not at all. That is not a fault in the picker; it is what independent random draws do. If your goal is that everyone contributes, independent draws are the wrong instrument and removal is the right one.
Note what happens to the odds as you go. Without replacement, each remaining name’s chance rises with every round: one in ten, then one in nine, then one in eight. Anyone still in the pool late is close to certain to be picked. Students work this out quickly, and it is a useful thing for them to notice — the pressure of “might be me” increases rather than decreases as the pool empties.
A round is one pass through the whole list, everyone picked once. In practice:
Because removal is nothing more than a line being deleted from the box, everything is editable mid-round. A student arrives late: add their name and they join the remaining pool. Someone is absent: delete their line before you start. You removed the wrong person: type the name back in and they return. Nothing is locked.
The tool holds one list, in one page, for as long as that page is open. It has no memory of previous days — there is no stored history of who was picked last week, no account, nothing written to your browser’s storage. Reload the page and it returns to its sample names. This is a direct consequence of the tool storing nothing anywhere, which is also why nothing you type can leak.
So term-level fairness is a habit, not a feature, and the habit is straightforward: keep the master roster somewhere you can edit — a note, a document, a spreadsheet column — and let that file, rather than the tool, carry the state between sessions. Some patterns that work:
Yes, and the animation has nothing to do with it. The picker chooses first and animates afterwards: the moment you press the button it selects one position from your list at random, then computes the rotation — several full turns plus a fraction — that will bring that slice to rest under the pointer, and eases the wheel along that path. There is no physics being simulated, so click speed, hold time and where the wheel stopped last round cannot influence the outcome.
Each draw is uniform: every line in the box has exactly the same chance as every other line, and all the slices are the same size, so nothing about the geometry favours anyone. The choice is made over list positions rather than labels, which is precisely why a duplicated name gets two real chances rather than being collapsed into one.
The underlying randomness is the browser’s own built-in random number generator. For deciding who reads next, who presents, who takes the whiteboard pen or who gets the last biscuit, that is unpredictable in every way that matters. It is not a cryptographic or audited source, so this is not the right mechanism for a legally regulated prize draw or any selection that might have to be proven fair to an outside party after the fact.
Human selection is systematically biased in ways the person selecting cannot see. Attention goes to the front of the room, to raised hands, to the names that are easiest to pronounce and the students who most recently did something notable, and away from whoever avoided eye contact. A picker removes that pattern, and — equally important — it removes it visibly. When the whole roster is on the wheel and the pool shrinks in front of everyone, being picked stops reading as being singled out. That perception is doing as much work as the randomness itself.
Cold-calling for answers, choosing who reads aloud, allocating presentation slots, deciding who fetches the equipment. Removal is what makes it a rotation rather than a lottery.
Speaking order, who takes notes, who runs the retro, who demos. A round with removal produces an order nobody had to negotiate and that is not the same seating order as last week.
Assigning shifts, chores, on-call slots or the jobs no one volunteers for. Run one round to fill every slot from a single roster, and use duplicate lines when someone has been let off previously and owes a turn.
Pick names one at a time, removing each, to build pairs, an order of play, or a secret-gift assignment. If you need groups rather than a sequence, a team generator that shuffles a roster into evenly sized teams is a better fit than picking one name at a time.
If you only ever need a single draw and never the round — a giveaway winner, one volunteer — a plain wheel of names does the same job with the same wheel, and a general spinner wheel handles options rather than people.
Each name you enter gets an equal-sized slice on the wheel, and the winner is selected by your browser's random number generator. That gives every name an identical chance — a list of 20 names means each has a true 1-in-20 probability on each spin.
Yes. Pick the first name, then use the "remove" option in the result pop-up to drop it from the pool and spin again for the next. Repeat to choose as many unique winners as you need, with no duplicates.
Absolutely. Copy a column of names and paste it into the entry box — one name per line. The picker reads each line as a separate entry and redraws the wheel instantly.
Yes on both counts. The random name picker is free with no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser. The names you paste are never uploaded or stored on our servers.