How to pick a random name
- Paste or type your names in the box, one per line.
- Set how many to pick.
- Press Pick. Press it again to draw again from the full list.
- Use Copy to keep the winners.
Why this is fair
Many random pickers draw with a weak generator or add a spinning wheel that can be tuned. This one uses the cryptographic generator in your browser. It performs a Fisher-Yates shuffle: for each position it swaps in a name chosen uniformly from the names still left. After the shuffle, every ordering of the list is equally likely, so every name has the same chance of being first, second or third.
The draw uses rejection sampling to avoid a subtle bias that appears when a random number is reduced with a remainder.
Worked example
A class has six students: Asha, Ben, Chitra, Dev, Esha and Farid. The teacher wants two presenters.
- Paste the six names and set the count to 2.
- Press Pick. One possible result is Chitra and Farid.
- The chance that any one student is picked is 2 in 6, which is 33.3%.
- Pressing Pick again may give a different pair, because each press is a new draw.
For a giveaway with 500 entrants and 3 prizes, each person has a 3 in 500 chance (0.6%) before the draw.
Tips for fair draws
- Clean the list first, so nobody is on it twice by accident.
- Decide beforehand how many winners and whether to redraw if a winner is absent.
- For a public draw, share a screenshot of the list and the result.
- To draw by ticket numbers instead of names, use the random number generator.
Limits
You can paste up to 10,000 names. Names are trimmed of spaces and empty lines are skipped. A wheel animation is not included, because it adds delay without making the result any fairer.
Related tools
Choose numbers with the random number generator. Working out someone’s years, months and days? Try the age calculator. Running a prize giveaway with a discount code? The discount calculator works out the price, and the time zone converter sets a draw time for entrants abroad. Your list never leaves your device.