Random Picker

Paste your list, one item per line, and draw a winner.

Options
—

Paste a list — names, tasks, numbers, anything — one per line, and the picker draws from it uniformly. This is the same sampling code used by the number generator, applied to your own items instead of a numeric range.

For a draw with several winners, set the number of picks. With no-repeats on, the tool samples without replacement, so a winner cannot be drawn twice — which is the correct behaviour for raffles and task assignment.

How to use it

  1. Paste one item per line.
  2. Set how many to draw.
  3. Leave no-repeats on for a giveaway, turn it off if it is a dice-style pick with replacement.

Picking several winners without bias

The naive approach — draw one, remove it, draw again — is actually fine, but it is easy to implement in a way that skews results, for instance by removing the wrong index after sorting. A partial Fisher-Yates shuffle avoids the question entirely: it moves each chosen item to the front and picks from the remainder.

Blank lines are ignored, so pasting from a spreadsheet with trailing newlines will not create phantom entries. Duplicate items in your input are kept as separate entries, because two people with the same name are still two people.

Reviewed 2026-10-21. This tool runs entirely in your browser — no server, no account, and nothing you generate is stored.

Frequently asked questions

How many items can the list hold?

A few thousand comfortably. Beyond that the textarea becomes unwieldy, and a spreadsheet with a formula is a better tool.

Are duplicate names treated as one entry?

No. Each line is a separate item, so two identical names give that person twice the chance — which is usually what you want if they genuinely appear twice.

Can I keep the list between visits?

Not currently — the list lives in the page only. Reloading clears it, which is also the privacy-preserving default.

Related tools

More from Random numbers.