Random Name Picker
Paste a list of names or items and pick one - or several - at random. Great for raffles, giveaways, and teams.
- Free, no account
- No watermark
- No usage limit
About the Random Name Picker
The only reason to hand a decision to a random picker is so nobody can say you rigged it. Point at someone yourself and you own the choice, and if it's your kid who loses the toss or your friend who wins the prize, that's an argument waiting to happen. Let a draw decide and the answer stops being yours. So forget the spinning animation for a second. What you want is a pick you can stand behind when someone squints at it. Paste your names one per line or separated by commas, press Pick, and one winner comes up in big letters the whole room can read. It runs in your browser, there's no sign-up, and nothing you type ever leaves the page.
Cheap pickers fail two ways before the prize is even on the line. The first is the draw itself. Plenty of them run on the ordinary randomness built for casual scripting, which is fine for a coin-flip toy but can lean very slightly toward certain spots in a list. This one uses a cryptographic random generator instead, the stronger kind browsers keep around for security work, so every name has a genuinely equal shot and no position in your list is favored. You won't feel the difference on a five-name list, on a raffle where one entry in three hundred wins something real an even draw is the whole point.
The second way a pick goes bad has nothing to do with the tool, it's the rerolling. A group keeps drawing until a favorite finally comes up, and suddenly "random" just means "we tried until we liked it." The fix is a rule you set before the first draw, not after: one pick, no do-overs unless a name was actually invalid. It's boring, but it's what keeps the draw honest.
How to use
- Paste your list into the box, one name per line or separated by commas. You can mix both, and blank lines and stray spaces get ignored, so pasting straight from a spreadsheet or a group chat works without cleanup.
- Check the counter under the box. It shows how many entries the tool found, so if that number looks wrong you've got a stray comma or two names stuck together to fix.
- Set how many to pick. Leave it at 1 for a single winner, or bump it up to draw several distinct names at once.
- Flip on "Remove picked items" if you want each winner pulled out of the list after it's drawn. More on why below.
- Press Pick. The winner shows up large under the buttons where everyone can see it.
- Use Shuffle all to scramble the whole list into a random order instead of drawing, or Clear to wipe the box and start fresh.
Drawing a whole list without repeats
One winner is the easy case. The reason people keep this tab open is the messier job, working through a whole list where nobody should come up twice, and that's what the "Remove picked items" checkbox handles. It's the feature I'd actually point you to.
Leave it off and every name stays in the pool after each draw, so the same person can win again on the next press. That's what you want for something like re-picking who goes first each round of a game. Flip it on and each winner drops out of the list the instant it's chosen. Now you can just keep hitting Pick and the tool deals its way through the group one name at a time until the box is empty, and it can't ever hand you a repeat because a picked name is already gone.
That one toggle covers most of the jobs people actually show up for. A multi-prize raffle where you draw the grand prize first and the runners-up after, with no chance of one person sweeping two. A classroom where every kid should get a turn before anyone gets a second. Secret Santa assigns each person exactly once. Or an elimination bracket that shrinks round by round. You set the rule with a single checkbox, then stop tracking who's already been called, which is the exact part people fumble when they do it by hand.
Shuffle all is the other half of this. Instead of pulling names out one at a time, it randomizes the entire list in place, so you get a fair running order for a standup, a reading rotation, or a seating plan in one click. Split that shuffled list into chunks and you've got randomly balanced teams. And because the list only lives in the page while it's open and disappears the moment you close the tab, real names for a gift exchange or a class roster stay private. Press Clear and they're gone right away.
Frequently asked questions
Can the same name come up twice?
Within a single draw, no. Ask for five names at once and you get five different people. Across separate presses it depends on that checkbox: with "Remove picked items" off, everyone stays in the pool and can be drawn again, and with it on, each winner is out for good. The thing to watch is duplicate entries. If a name is typed into the list twice, the tool reads it as two separate chances, so it can appear twice unless you clean the list first.
How many names can I add, and how many can I pick at once?
The list itself has no fixed cap, so a full class roster or a long ticket list is fine. The number you draw in one press goes up to twenty. If you need more winners than that, draw twenty with removal turned on, then press Pick again for the next batch. On very long lists, keeping entries short makes the winner easier to read when it pops up.
What if I ask for more picks than there are names?
It just hands you everyone. Set the count to ten on a list of six and you get all six back in a random order, nothing breaks. That's handy when you're really using it to shuffle a small group rather than crown one winner.
Can I give one person better odds on purpose?
Yes, and it's low-tech. Add their name more than once. Two entries is two tickets in the pot, three is three, and so on. A teacher might do it to hand a quiet student an extra shot, and raffles do it when someone bought several tickets. Just remember accidental duplicates behave the same way, so double-check the list if every entry is meant to be equal.
Does it work for things that aren't names?
Anything you can type on a line works. Ticket numbers, menu options, chores, prize tiers, whatever needs a random choice. For raffles it helps to label entries so each is distinct, something like Ticket 01 and Ticket 02 rather than a stack of identical "ticket" lines, so every one gets counted separately and you can read the result back cleanly.
Will it remember my list next time?
No, and that's deliberate. Nothing is saved, logged, or synced anywhere. Refresh or close the tab and the list is gone, which is exactly what you want for real names. The trade-off is there's no history, so if you're running a draw you need a record of, copy the entry list somewhere before you start.
How do I show a watching audience the draw was clean?
Put the full list of entries on screen before you draw so everyone can see who was eligible, say the total count out loud, and pick once without redrawing. On a livestream or a social giveaway, recording your screen during the press is the simplest proof anyone can check afterward. The whole trick is doing it in the open, rather than announcing a winner nobody watched get chosen.