Random Name Picker

What is the Random Name Picker?

Random Name Picker is the fast alternative to a spinning wheel. You paste a list, choose how many names you need, and get the result immediately. It is the tool to use when you are drawing thirty raffle winners, or when you simply do not want to watch a five-second animation twenty times in a row.

It also handles the details that a wheel glosses over: whether the same person can be picked twice, whether picked names should disappear from the pool, and what each person’s actual chance is once weights are involved.

How to use it

1. Paste your names into the list panel, one per line.
2. Set how many names you want to pick in “Draw settings”.
3. Decide whether repeats are allowed. With repeats off, each pick is removed from the pool before the next one is drawn.
4. Optionally tick “show each name’s chance” to see the exact percentages before you draw.
5. Press Pick. The result appears immediately, in draw order.
6. Copy the result, download it as CSV, or clear the list and start again.

How the random selection works

For a single name the tool draws one index with rejection sampling over crypto.getRandomValues(). For several names without repeats it runs a partial Fisher-Yates shuffle: it swaps the first position with a randomly chosen position from the whole list, then the second with a random position from what remains, and so on — which is exactly equivalent to drawing names out of a hat one at a time. With weights enabled it instead builds an integer ticket range proportional to the weights and draws a ticket, removing the winner’s tickets before the next draw.

The full algorithm — including the rejection-sampling step and the wheel stop-angle calculation — is written out on the methodology page.

Practical examples

• Drawing 25 winners from 4,000 newsletter entries in one action.
• Choosing three people from a team of nine to run the next demo.
• Picking a “secret partner” for everyone by drawing names without repeats.
• Selecting a random sample of survey responses to read in full.
• Assigning a random reviewer to each pull request in a rotation.

Available options

• Pick one or many, in a single action.
• Repeats on or off, with a clear error when you ask for more unique names than exist.
• Optional weights, with a chance-per-draw table.
• Remove picked names from the list automatically.
• Show or hide the draw order.
• Reorder the list by dragging a name, or with the up and down buttons beside it.
• Copy results, download CSV, keep a session history and export it.
• Share the pick or a link to the tool — the link carries no part of your list.

Privacy

Entry lists here are often customer or student names. Everything you type stays in this browser tab. There is no account, no upload step and no server-side copy of your list: the draw runs in JavaScript on your own device. Nothing is written to browser storage unless you explicitly save a list or tick the option to keep your draw history, and both can be cleared at any time from the privacy page.

Full details are in the privacy policy, which also has a button that deletes everything this site has stored in your browser.

Fairness and limitations

Without weights, every name has an identical chance on the first draw, and the remaining names have an identical chance on each subsequent draw. Duplicated names count twice, which is why the list editor offers a duplicate remover with an undo. When you apply weights, the chance column shows the exact percentages, so nobody has to guess what a weight of 2.5 actually means. The tool never applies a hidden weight or reorders results to look more interesting.