Random name picker wheel

What the wheel is good for

A spinning wheel is the right tool when you need one winner at a time and you want other people to watch it happen. That last part matters more than it sounds. If you are alone and just need a name, a list shuffle is faster. The wheel earns its keep when there is an audience — a class, a stream, a room at an office party — because the four seconds of deceleration are what make the result feel like an event rather than an announcement.

Typical uses: drawing a giveaway winner from a list of entrants, cold-calling a student without falling into the front-row habit, choosing which team demos first, picking a restaurant when a group cannot decide, and assigning chores to people who will only accept the outcome if they saw it decided.

How the result is actually decided

The winner is drawn before the wheel starts moving. When you press spin, the tool asks your browser's cryptographic random number generator for a value, maps it onto the total weight of your entries, and records which slice it landed in. Only then does the animation begin, and it decelerates to a stop at a random point inside that slice.

This is worth being explicit about because the alternative — spin first, read whatever ends up under the pointer — sounds more honest and is actually harder to verify. Our way, the fairness question reduces to a single line of arithmetic on a uniform random number, which we can describe precisely and you can check against the explanation in our guide. It also means the animation cannot disagree with the announced winner.

Weighted entries

Write Ana*3 and Ana gets three slices instead of one, so she is three times as likely to win as a plain entry. The counter under the text box tells you when weights are active, showing both the number of entries and the total number of slices, so you never apply a weight by accident.

Weights are legitimate in plenty of situations — one entry per raffle ticket bought, extra entries for referrals, a bonus for the person who came last time and lost. They stop being legitimate the moment they are secret. If your audience thinks the draw is even and it is not, that is the one thing that will genuinely damage you when it comes out. Weighted draws explained covers how to disclose it in a single sentence.

Drawing more than one winner

For a first, second and third prize, spin and then press Remove winner before spinning again. The name comes out of the list, so nobody can win twice, and the running list of winners for this session appears beside the wheel in the order they were drawn.

Decide the order before you start and say it out loud: are you drawing the grand prize first or last? Both are fine, but announcing it afterwards looks like you decided based on who came out.

Can I share a wheel with someone else?

Yes. Copy share link puts the entry list into the URL, so whoever opens it sees the same wheel already filled in. The list travels inside the link itself — we never store it — which means a very long list makes a very long URL, and anyone with the link can read the entries. Do not use it for anything confidential.

Does the wheel remember my list?

Only if you ask. Save list keeps it in your own browser's local storage, so it reloads next time you visit on that device. It is never uploaded, so it will not follow you to another computer, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Why did the same name win twice in a row?

Because that is what real randomness does. Each spin is independent and has no memory of the last one, exactly like a coin that has just come up heads three times. If you need every entry to come up once before any repeats, you do not want a wheel — you want the list randomizer, which shuffles the whole list into an order.