Random Item Picker: Pick Random Items From a List
Pick one or more random items from your list, with or without repeats, using your browser's cryptographic random generator. Draw again as often as you like. Nothing is uploaded.
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About the Random Item Picker
This page picks random items from a list you type or paste. Put one item on each line, or separate them with commas, semicolons, tabs, spaces or a custom string, choose how many items to pick, and the pick appears at once. Press Pick again for a fresh draw from the same list. It works for drawing a raffle winner, choosing who presents first, picking a restaurant, assigning a random task or sampling rows from a data set. Everything happens in your browser: the list is never uploaded, and nothing is drawn until you type a list or press the button.
How to pick a random item
Steps
- Type or paste the list. New line is the default separator; choose Comma or another separator if your items are on one line.
- Set Items to pick. One is selected to start; pick several to draw a shortlist or a sample.
- Turn on Allow the same item twice if an item may be drawn more than once, as when rolling a die. Leave it off to draw distinct items, like names from a hat.
- Press Pick again for another draw, then Copy or Download .txt to keep the result.
Privacy
The draw is made by code on this page, using your browser's random generator. The list is never sent to our servers and disappears when you close the tab.
How the draw works
Fair randomness
Each draw uses the Web Crypto API, the same cryptographic random generator browsers use for keys. A raw random number is turned into a position in the list by rejection sampling: values that would make some positions slightly more likely than others are thrown away and drawn again, so every item has exactly the same chance.
Without repeats
When repeats are off, the page runs a partial Fisher–Yates shuffle: it swaps a randomly chosen remaining item into the next place and stops once enough items are picked. Every item, and every order of the picked items, is equally likely, and no item can come up twice. You cannot pick more distinct items than the list contains; the page says so if you try.
Duplicates in the list
If the same name appears twice in your list it has twice the chance of being picked, because each line is a separate entry. Remove copies first with the Duplicate Remover if every value should count once, or use trimming, which is on by default, so that stray spaces do not create near-copies.
Related tools
The List Editor offers this picker together with twenty other list operations, such as filtering and creating random lists. For a random order of the whole list, shuffle it with the List Sorter; for random numbers in a range, use the Random Number Generator, and for a simple heads or tails, the Coin Flipper.
Open-source credits
The picker is implemented in-house in TypeScript, with no third-party library. It follows the Fisher–Yates shuffle in Durstenfeld's in-place form, stopped after the requested number of items, and draws from the Web Crypto API with rejection sampling to avoid modulo bias.