How to pick a random name
The whole tool is that textarea above — no accounts, no set-up, no fiddling. There are only three steps:
- Add your names. Type them in, or paste a whole column straight from a spreadsheet — one name per line. If you copy a column out of Google Sheets or Excel, it arrives one-per-line automatically, so a class register or a list of raffle entrants drops right in.
- Draw. Tap the button and one name is chosen at random, with a little confetti to make it feel like an occasion. Draw again as many times as you like — the full list is in play every time, so anyone can come up again.
- Picking several winners? After a name comes up, delete its line from the box and draw again, so each winner is pulled from a shrinking pool and nobody wins twice. Prefer it hands-off? The Pick Me app removes winners for you automatically.
Everything runs in your browser, so it's instant and it works offline once the page has loaded. Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere — refresh the tab and the list is gone.
A couple of small things worth knowing: blank lines and stray spaces are ignored, so a messy paste won't skew the odds, and every line counts as its own entry — which means if the same name appears twice, it simply gets two chances. That's a feature, not a bug (see the raffle-tickets trick below), but if you don't want it, just delete the duplicate line.
Where a name picker earns its keep
"Pick a random name" sounds almost too simple to need a tool. But the moment a real person has to be chosen — and other people are watching — doing it by eye stops feeling fair. That's where a picker quietly does its job.
Giveaways & raffles
This is the classic. You've run a contest, the entries are in, and now you have to choose a winner that nobody can accuse you of rigging. Paste the entrants, draw, done — and because every pick is cryptographically random, each name genuinely has the same shot. If you're pulling winners from social-media comments or need to draw several prizes in a row, the dedicated giveaway winner picker is built for exactly that flow, with multi-winner draws front and centre.
Classrooms
Teachers reach for this one constantly: who reads next, who answers, whose group presents first. Cold-calling by name keeps everyone on their toes, but if you always seem to land on the same three hands it stops feeling fair — and kids notice instantly. A random draw takes you out of it entirely; the tool made the call, not you. There's a purpose-built classroom name picker with the roster workflow in mind, including drawing without repeats so everyone gets a turn before anyone gets a second.
Workplaces
Standup order. Who demos this sprint. Who runs the retro. Who's on the coffee run, and — less popular — who takes this week's on-call. A quick draw settles all of it without a debate, and it sidesteps the quiet politics of volunteering (or not volunteering). Splitting the room into working groups instead of picking one person? That's what the team generator is for — paste everyone and it shuffles them into balanced teams.
Families & friends
Who picks the film. Who does the washing up. Who gets the last slice. "Chore roulette" turns the least fun negotiation of the week into a five-second game, and somehow nobody argues with the picker the way they'd argue with a parent. It's the same reason a coin flip ends a standoff — handing the decision to something neutral lets everyone off the hook.
Fairness you can defend
"Trust me, I picked randomly" is fine for deciding who does the dishes. It is not fine for a giveaway with a real prize on the line. So here's exactly how this picker chooses, in plain terms.
When you tap draw, the winner is chosen using crypto.getRandomValues() — the cryptographically secure random number generator built into your browser. It's the same class of randomness the web uses for encryption, and much stronger than the Math.random() shortcut a lot of "random" websites rely on. On top of that we use rejection sampling: if a raw random number would land in a range that slightly favours some names over others, we throw it away and draw again. The result is that in a list of N names, every single name has odds of exactly 1 in N — no rounding, no bias toward the top of the list, no bias toward shorter names.
You can also draw without replacement — the digital version of folding names on paper and pulling them from a hat one at a time. This page keeps the widget deliberately simple, so you do it by hand: after a name wins, delete its line from the box before the next draw, and that name can't come up again. Same maths, none of the paper cuts. If you'd rather each winner drop out on its own, the Pick Me app's remove-winners option takes them out of the pool for you.
Here's the raffle-tickets trick that follows from all this: because each line is a separate 1-in-N entry, you can weight the draw just by repeating names. Someone who bought three tickets goes on three lines and gets three times the chance — no special settings, no maths on your part. Enter five names once each and it's a straight 20% apiece; add a sixth line for one of them and their odds jump to 2 in 6 while everyone else sits at 1 in 6. Simple, transparent, and easy to explain to anyone who asks.
And because the whole thing runs locally, your list never leaves the browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged or tracked. For a teacher that means a student roster stays private; for HR it means a list of staff names doesn't touch a third-party server. That's a genuinely useful privacy property, not a marketing line — you can check it yourself by opening the page, going offline, and watching it still work.
Name picker vs spinner wheel
People often ask which is "more random" — a list draw or a spinner wheel. Neither. Both use the same cryptographic RNG under the hood, and both give every name identical odds. The difference is pure theatre.
A wheel is a performance. It turns, it slows, the whole room leans in — perfect when the draw itself is the entertainment, like a live giveaway or a party game. A list draw is fast. There's no spin to wait for, and it doesn't care how long your list is, so it's the better tool when you're drawing from 200 raffle entrants or a full class register. This picker comfortably handles up to 1,000 names; a wheel gets unreadable long before that.
A good rule of thumb: if an audience is watching and you want a moment, spin a wheel. If you just need a fair answer and you want it now, draw from the list.
Multiple winners & recurring draws
Two things trip people up on a busy draw: picking several winners, and drawing from the same group day after day.
For several winners, draw once, delete the winning line from the box, then draw again — first place, second place, third place, each pulled from a shrinking pool so nobody wins twice. That covers most giveaways and every "pick three people for the committee" situation. The order you draw in is meaningful too: the first name out is your grand-prize winner, the next few are runners-up, and if a winner turns out to be ineligible you can simply draw once more to fill their place. If you're handing out a lot of prizes and don't want to edit the list between picks, Spin The Wheel — Pick Me removes winners automatically and can draw several at once.
For draws you run over and over, the web tool starts fresh every time, which is by design — but retyping the same class or team gets old fast. That's where Spin The Wheel — Pick Me for iPhone and iPad picks up: saved lists you reuse in one tap, batch draws that pick N winners at once instead of one at a time, weighted entries when some names should be more likely, automatic remove-winners, and a history of past picks so you can prove who came up last week. It's rated 4.6★ by more than 14,800 people, used by over 3 million, available in 26 languages, syncs to Apple Watch — and, like this page, it has never shown a single ad.