Random Name Picker
Paste a list, draw a name
Put one name per line and press pick. Draw several at once by raising the count — they will always be different people, never the same name twice in one draw.
Nothing is uploaded. The list lives in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.
Pasting from a spreadsheet
Lines come first. If you paste
Novák, Jan
Svoboda, Petryou get two people, not four — each line is one entry. Commas only split when everything sits on a single line, which is what you get pasting a spreadsheet row rather than a column.
So: paste a column and it just works. Paste a row and the commas do the right thing too.
Making one entry more likely
The picker treats every line as one ticket in the hat. List a name twice and it has two tickets — double the chance of the others.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is occasionally what you want: raffle entries where people earned extra tickets, a rota where someone owes a turn, a prize draw where a purchase counts twice.
| Lines | Chance for Anna |
|---|---|
| Anna, Bob, Cyril | 1 in 3 — 33% |
| Anna, Anna, Bob, Cyril | 2 in 4 — 50% |
| Anna ×3, Bob, Cyril | 3 in 5 — 60% |
Be aware of the flip side: with “remove picked” on, only one of the duplicate lines is removed, so a name listed three times can still be drawn twice more. That is usually right for raffle tickets and wrong for an ordering, so turn duplicates off when you are drawing a sequence.
Remove picked, or leave them in
The switch changes what the tool is for.
Removing turns it into an ordering machine. Pick, and the name leaves the list. Pick again for second place, then third. Good for presentation order, for drawing several prizes, for dealing out chores.
Leaving them in means every draw starts fresh from the full list. Good for “who answers this question”, where the same person can plausibly come up twice.
Either way the remaining count under the list tells you where you stand.
Making a giveaway people trust
For anything with a prize, “I picked randomly” is not evidence. Anyone can rerun a draw until they like the winner, and nobody watching can tell.
If your draw needs to be defensible, use the seeded mode in the random number generator instead:
- Publish the fingerprint before entries close.
- Draw after.
- Publish the seed and the certificate.
Entrants can then replay the draw themselves. This picker is for the everyday cases where that ceremony would be silly.
Where a name picker gets used
- Giveaways — one winner, or a winner and two runners-up
- Classrooms — who answers, who presents, random groups for reading
- Meetings — who takes notes, who demos first
- Teams — who is on call, who gets the good desk