Random Name Picker

Paste a list, pick a name. Save the list under a name and it will still be here tomorrow — no account, nothing uploaded.

Why the list keeps disappearing on other pickers

Most free name pickers hold your list in the page only. Refresh, close the tab, or come back the next lesson and it is gone, so you paste the same thirty names again. This one keeps named lists in your browser's local storage, which means you can save one list per class or team and pick it from the dropdown next time. It is the difference between a tool you use once and one you use every morning.

Because storage is local, the lists live on the device you saved them on. A roster saved on a classroom desktop will not appear on your laptop at home. That is the trade-off for not having accounts: nothing to sign up for, and nothing of yours on somebody else's server.

Elimination mode, and when you actually want it

A plain random draw is independent: the same name can come up twice in a row, because each pick ignores what came before. That is correct for a raffle, and wrong for calling on students, where being picked twice while a classmate is never picked feels arbitrary and is quickly noticed.

Elimination mode sets each picked name aside until the list runs out, then offers to start again. Over a full cycle everyone is picked exactly once, in random order. Use plain mode for prize draws and elimination mode for rotation.

Giving someone extra tickets

Put x3 after a name and it enters the draw three times. This is the raffle case: someone who bought five tickets should have five chances, and typing their name five times makes the roster unreadable and the count wrong. The line under the box shows both figures — how many people are in the list, and how many tickets are in the drum — so you can see at a glance whether the odds are what you intended.

Weighting deliberately does not touch team splitting. Each person is placed exactly once there, because a weighted team is simply a larger team, which is a different thing and better done by asking for fewer teams.

Splitting into teams

Set the team count above zero and the tool shuffles the whole list with a Fisher–Yates shuffle, then deals it out one name at a time into each group in turn. Because the shuffle is uniform, every possible assignment is equally likely — that part is true of any method of cutting up a properly shuffled list, and claims to the contrary are usually wrong. What round-robin dealing buys you is size balance: when the count does not divide evenly, the remainder is spread one per group automatically, so teams differ by at most one member without any extra arithmetic.

Frequently asked questions

Is the picker actually random?

It uses crypto.getRandomValues, your browser's cryptographic random source, with rejection sampling. The naive approach — taking a random number modulo the list length — very slightly favours the earlier names in the list, because the range rarely divides evenly. Rejection sampling discards the uneven tail and draws again, so every remaining name has genuinely equal probability.

Are my saved lists sent anywhere?

No. There is no account and no backend behind the picker, so your names are held in your browser's local storage on your own device and are never transmitted. Picking a name issues no network request at all.

To be precise rather than reassuring: the page carries no advertising yet, and when it does, those ad slots will load third-party resources and set cookies once you consent, which you will see in your browser's network tab. What they never receive is your list — the advertising and the tool share a page, not data. The privacy policy sets out what the ad vendors will collect. Clearing your browser data removes the saved lists.

Does it work without an internet connection?

Once the page has loaded, yes. Picking, saving, and team-splitting all run in the page itself, so a dropped connection mid-lesson does not stop it working.

How many names can it handle?

Tens of thousands without noticeable delay. The practical limit is your patience for pasting them, not the tool. Blank lines and stray whitespace are ignored, so pasting a column straight out of a spreadsheet works.

Limitations

Saved lists are per-browser and per-device, and a shared or public computer will share them with whoever uses it next — do not save anything you would not want the next user to see. Weighting is capped at 999 tickets per name, and the weighted draw applies to picking only — team splitting always places each person exactly once, because a weighted team would just be a bigger team.