List randomizer
Shuffles your whole list into a random order, rather than picking a single winner. Useful when you need a running order, a ranked waitlist, or backup winners.
Shuffle a list
One item per line, up to 500.Press Randomize and the shuffled order appears here.
When a shuffle beats a wheel
A wheel answers “who wins?”. A shuffle answers “in what order?” — and a surprising number of problems are really the second question wearing the first one's clothes.
If you are drawing three prizes, shuffling once and taking the top three is cleaner than spinning three times: one action, one result, and the backups are already lined up in order if the first winner never replies. If you are scheduling eight presentations, you need the full running order anyway. If you are assigning six chores to six people, you need a complete pairing, not a name.
The other advantage is that a shuffle cannot repeat. Every item appears exactly once, so you never get the awkward moment where the same person is drawn twice and you have to explain that you are putting them back.
How the shuffle works
We use the Fisher-Yates shuffle. Walking the list from the end backwards, each item is swapped with a randomly chosen item at or before its position, using a fresh random number from your browser's cryptographic generator each time. The property that matters is that all possible orderings are equally likely — for a list of ten items, each of the 3,628,800 possible arrangements has exactly the same chance.
That sounds like the obvious outcome of any shuffling method, and it is not. The naive approach — walk the list and swap each item with a random position anywhere in the list — looks identical, is one character different in code, and produces a measurably biased result that favours certain arrangements. It is one of the most common bugs in shuffling code, and it is invisible unless you go looking for it. Ours does the correct version, and we take the same care with the random numbers themselves, which is covered in how random is random.
Practical notes
- Paste from a spreadsheet. Copy a column straight from Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and paste it in — one cell per line is exactly the format this expects. Blank lines are ignored, and surrounding spaces are trimmed.
- Duplicates are kept. If the same name appears twice, it appears twice in the result. That is deliberate: sometimes a duplicate is a second raffle ticket, and it is not our place to decide it was a mistake.
- Copy the result. The copy button gives you the numbered order as plain text, ready to paste into your notes, a post, or the record you keep of the draw.
- Every press is a new shuffle. Pressing Randomize again discards the previous order. If a result matters, copy it before you press again — there is no undo, because nothing is stored.
How many items can it handle?
Five hundred lines. Beyond that we stop reading, because the result stops being something a human can usefully read on screen. If you have thousands of entries, number them and use the random number generator instead — drawing ticket numbers from a range is the right shape for that problem.
Is the order really random every time?
Yes, and independently so. A shuffle has no memory of the previous one, so an item that came out first last time is exactly as likely to come out first again. Over a handful of shuffles you will see patterns that look meaningful and are not — that is how small samples behave.