Spin a free wheel of names to draw a random winner for classroom picks, raffles, and giveaways. Add names, spin, and remove winners as you go.
Tip: click the wheel to spin.
8 entrys on the wheel.
This is a name wheel. You paste a list of people — one name per line — into the box beside the wheel, press Spin the wheel, and after a four-second slowdown the wheel stops with one name under the pointer. That name appears in a panel over the page, in large type, so it can be read from the back of a room or across a video call. From that panel you can spin again straight away, or remove the drawn name and keep spinning the smaller pool.
Everything happens inside the page. The wheel is drawn onto a canvas element in your browser, the draw is made in your browser, and the names you type are held in the page’s memory and nowhere else. The tool sends no request anywhere with your list, so nothing you paste leaves the machine you are sitting at.
The page loads with eight example names already on the wheel so there is something to spin immediately. Replace them with your own:
The wheel redraws every time you edit the box, so you can add a late arrival or delete someone who has gone home between spins without reloading anything.
Segments are cut evenly around the circle and coloured from a repeating twelve-colour palette, so with more than twelve names two slices somewhere on the wheel will share a colour. Labels are drawn along each segment and shrink as the list grows, and long names are truncated with an ellipsis so they do not overrun into the next slice. The full name is never lost — the winner panel shows it in full, untruncated.
| Names on the wheel | Label size | Name shortened after |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | Largest | 18 characters |
| 11–14 | Medium | 18 characters |
| 15–18 | Medium | 12 characters |
| 19 or more | Smallest | 12 characters |
A practical consequence: for a roster of thirty or more, first names alone read far better on the wheel than Firstname Lastname. If two students share a first name, an initial — Sam K, Sam T — keeps both readable and keeps them distinct in the winner panel.
It is not weighted by anything, and the animation is not what decides the outcome. This is the question people most often ask about a name wheel, and it is worth answering precisely, because the honest answer is the opposite of what the moving picture suggests.
The order of events is: you press spin, the tool immediately picks a winning position from the list at random, and only then does it calculate the rotation needed to bring that slice to rest under the pointer — five full turns plus whatever fraction lands it in place, eased to a stop over roughly four seconds. The spin you watch is a presentation of a decision that has already been made. There is no physics simulation, no momentum, and no way for the speed of a click or the position the wheel stopped at last time to nudge the result.
The draw itself is uniform over the positions in your list: every line has exactly the same chance as every other line. Segment size cannot skew it, because the tool selects a list position rather than an angle, and in any case every segment on this wheel is the same size — the circle is divided into equal slices, always.
The randomness comes from the browser’s own built-in random number generator. That is genuinely unpredictable for the purposes of picking who answers next, who presents first, or who wins the raffle basket at a school fair. It is not a cryptographic draw, and it is not audited, so it is not the right instrument for a legally regulated prize draw or anything where a losing entrant might demand a verifiable record. For classroom, meeting and party use it is fair in every sense that matters.
It gets two slices, and it is twice as likely to win. The tool deliberately draws over list positions rather than over unique names, so a repeated line is treated as a second, separate entry that happens to have the same label. Both slices are drawn on the wheel and both can win.
That is worth knowing in both directions. If duplicates are accidental — a roster pasted twice, or a name that appears in two groups you merged — the draw is quietly skewed and you should deduplicate the list. If duplicates are deliberate, they are the one honest way to give someone extra chances: adding a raffle entrant three times gives them three of the wheel’s slices. When a duplicated name wins and you press the remove button, only one of its copies comes off, so the remaining copies stay in the running.
Under the winner is a button that removes that name and re-spins the shrunken pool. This is the difference between drawing one name and working through a roster. Pressing it deletes that line from the entry box, the wheel redraws a slice smaller, and nobody can be called twice.
Two things follow from the fact that removal is simply an edit to the text box. First, it is reversible: if you removed the wrong person, type the name back on its own line and it returns to the wheel. Second, there is no separate “already drawn” history — once a name is off the wheel, the wheel has no memory of it. If you want a record of the order names came out, write them down as you go, or keep the original roster in another window and delete from a copy.
If you find yourself removing every name in sequence, round after round, the sibling random name picker is built around exactly that pattern of drawing without replacement across a term.
The reason to spin rather than scan the room is that a teacher’s eye is not random. It drifts to the front rows, to the hands already up, and away from the student who looked away. A wheel removes that drift and makes it visible that it has been removed — students can see the whole roster on the wheel, which is the part that makes the process feel fair rather than merely being fair. Leave the wheel projected, spin between questions, and use the remove button when you want everyone to contribute once before anyone contributes twice.
Paste the entrant list, spin on camera, and the drawn name fills the screen at a size that is legible in a recording or a livestream. For multiple prizes, draw the top prize first and remove the winner before drawing the next, so nobody wins twice. Add an entrant’s name more than once if your rules award extra entries.
Spin to decide who speaks first, who takes the notes, or who demos. Removing each speaker as they finish turns the wheel into a running order that nobody had to negotiate. It also breaks the habit of always going in the same seating or alphabetical order, which is the order in which the last person always gets the least time.
A wheel is a good way to assign something nobody wants. The decision is made by the tool, in public, and there is nothing to argue with. Add a name twice if someone has been let off the last two rounds and owes a turn.
The list lives only in the page while it is open. Reloading the tab, closing it, or navigating away resets the wheel to its example names — nothing is saved to your browser, no account holds your rosters, and the list is not encoded into the page address, so copying the URL does not copy your names to a colleague.
This is a direct consequence of the privacy behaviour above: the tool cannot restore a list it never stored anywhere. If you use the same roster every week, keep the master copy where you already keep your lists — a note, a document, a spreadsheet column, a pinned chat message — and paste it in each time. Pasting a thirty-name column takes a couple of seconds, and the roster stays somewhere you can actually edit and share.
To share the wheel itself, share the page address. Whoever opens it gets an empty-of-your-data wheel and pastes their own list.
The same wheel backs a general-purpose spinner wheel for options rather than people, a yes-or-no wheel for two-way decisions, and a random team generator that shuffles a roster into evenly sized teams instead of drawing one name at a time.
Put one name per line in the entry box. You can paste a whole column straight from a spreadsheet or sign-up sheet, and the wheel redraws automatically. There's no practical limit, though very large lists make each slice's label smaller.
Yes. After the wheel lands on a name, choose "remove" in the result pop-up to drop it from the pool, then spin again. Repeating this draws every name once before any repeats — ideal for a full classroom rotation or ordered raffle.
It is. Every name gets an equal-sized slice, so each entrant has the same chance on every spin. The winner is chosen by your browser's random number generator, and the visible spin lets your audience see the draw is legitimate.
Yes. The wheel runs entirely in your browser. The names you type are never uploaded or stored on our servers, and they disappear when you close the tab unless you save them yourself.