Random Name Picker – Spin a Name Wheel to Draw Winners
Free random name picker. Enter one name per line and spin the wheel to draw a winner at random. Pick several winners at once, remove winners for the next draw and keep a history, with fair results from your browser's cryptographic random numbers.
What is the Random Name Picker?
The Random Name Picker lets you type a list of names, prizes or anything else, one per line, and spin a wheel to draw a winner at random. It is made for the moments when you would otherwise be tearing up paper slips: prize draws at parties and events, picking a student to answer in class, deciding the order for a gift exchange, or choosing the winners of a social media giveaway. You can draw several winners at once, and if you tick Remove winners from the list, you can keep drawing first, second and third prize without anyone winning twice.
The winner is not decided by how the wheel looks. It is chosen first with your browser's cryptographic random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues), and the wheel is then spun so that it stops on that entry. When the random number is turned into a position in your list, a technique called rejection sampling removes the small bias that simple division would introduce, so every entry has exactly the same chance. Your entries are never sent to a server; everything happens in your browser.
How to use the random name picker
- Enter the entries, one per line Type names, prizes or numbers on separate lines. Blank lines are ignored, so you can paste a list straight from a roster or spreadsheet. Anywhere from 2 to 1,000 entries are supported.
- Choose how many winners to draw Leave it at 1 to pick a single winner. Set it to 3 for a three-winner draw and three different entries are chosen in one go, numbered in the order they were drawn.
- Tick Remove winners if you are drawing in rounds When you draw first prize, then second, then third, ticking this option takes each winner off the list automatically so nobody can win twice.
- Spin the wheel and share the result Press Spin the wheel and it turns for a few seconds before stopping on the winner. Copy the result into a group chat or share it on X or LINE.
Tips for getting more out of it
- Writing the same name on two lines gives that person two tickets and twice the chance of winning. It is a simple way to weight entries, for example by number of visits.
- With more than 40 entries the wheel shows colour bands instead of names, but the draw is exactly as fair. The winner always appears in the result box.
- Results stay in the draw history for as long as the page is open. Closing the page clears them, so copy anything you want to keep.
- To put the winners into teams, paste them into the Random Group Generator; to have them play each other, use the Tournament Bracket Maker.
When to use a random name picker
Party and event prize draws
Instead of bingo, enter the guests' names and spin to decide who takes each prize. Share your screen and everyone can watch the wheel turn, which builds excitement and shows the draw is fair.
Calling on students or meeting participants
Pick a presenter, a chair or whoever is on duty at random. With Remove winners ticked, you can keep spinning until everyone has had a turn exactly once.
Social media giveaways
Paste the entrants' names or handles and draw the winners. Several winners can be chosen in a single draw, and the result can be copied straight into your announcement.
Making everyday decisions
Let the wheel choose where to eat, what to do this weekend or who goes first in a game. Add the same option more than once to make it more likely to come up.
Random name picker glossary
- Cryptographic random numbers
- Random numbers designed to be unpredictable, the same kind used to generate passwords and encryption keys. This tool draws its winners from values returned by the browser's crypto.getRandomValues.
- Modulo bias
- The slight unfairness that appears when you take a random number modulo the number of entries: some entries end up a little more likely than others. This tool removes it with rejection sampling.
- Rejection sampling
- Throwing away any random number that falls in the range that would cause bias and drawing again. It costs almost nothing extra and guarantees every entry exactly the same chance.
- Drawing without replacement
- A draw in which an entry that has already won cannot be picked again, like not putting a ticket back in the hat. It is used when choosing several winners or drawing prizes in order.
Random name picker FAQ
Side Note — Why picking by remainder makes a draw unfair
The most obvious way for a computer to pick one person out of six is to take a random number and use the remainder after dividing by six. Hidden in that method is a subtle bias. Take random numbers from 0 to 255 and use the remainder after dividing by 3: because 256 is not divisible by 3, a remainder of 0 comes up for 86 of the possible numbers while 1 and 2 come up for 85 each, so the first entry is slightly more likely to win. This is known as modulo bias.
How big the bias is depends on the range of the random numbers and the number of entries, and with 32-bit random numbers the difference is tiny. Even so, in a draw, where exactly equal chances are the whole point, it should not be ignored. The usual fix is rejection sampling: if a random number falls in the range that would cause bias, throw it away and draw again. The chance of having to throw one away is normally very small, so it almost never has to happen more than once.
Choosing several people without repeats has a long history too. In 1938 the statisticians Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates published a procedure for putting a sequence into random order using a table of random numbers. In 1964 Richard Durstenfeld published an efficient version for computers, and it is now widely known as the Fisher–Yates shuffle. This tool's draw works on the same idea, picking winners one at a time and removing each from the pool as it goes.