Random Word Generator

Q: Is this strong enough for a passphrase?

Only for something low-stakes. The full list of 524 words is worth about 9 bits per word, so five words is roughly 45 bits. The EFF long diceware list has 7776 words at 12.9 bits each, putting six words near 77 bits. For a passphrase that protects anything important, use a password manager or a printed diceware list and physical dice.

Q: Why does the same word keep coming up?

Almost always because your filters have shrunk the pool. Turning off repeats guarantees no word appears twice inside a single batch, but each batch is drawn independently, so pressing generate twice against a twelve-word pool will overlap. The pool counter under the controls tells you which situation you are in.

Q: Are the parts of speech reliable?

Mostly, with one unavoidable caveat: many English words are both noun and verb. Each entry in this list is filed under a single tag, so the tool will never show the same word under two labels, but it also will not tell you that a word like point or stack works as either.

Draw from a hand-built list of 524 English words. Filter by part of speech, length, first letter or drawability — and see how many words are left in the pool before you press generate.

How many words Part of speech Shortest Longest Starts with Output

Drawable or actable words only No repeats within a draw

The number under the buttons is the point of this page

Any word generator will give you words. What almost none of them tell you is what those words were drawn from. Stack two or three filters — a seven-letter adverb starting with S — and the pool can quietly collapse to a couple of candidates, which is exactly when the output starts feeling suspiciously repetitive. The counter here stays live: it reports how many words currently match, converts that into bits of unpredictability per word, and totals the bits for the draw you have set up. When it reads 2 words, you know the problem is your filters and not the randomness.

Bits are simply the base-2 logarithm of the pool size. A pool of 512 words is worth 9 bits per word, because it takes 9 yes-or-no answers to single out one of 512 things. It is the only honest way to compare a word draw against a password, and it makes the one weak use case obvious rather than hiding it.

What is in the list, and what is deliberately missing

524 words: 227 nouns, 143 verbs, 104 adjectives and 50 adverbs, assembled by hand rather than dumped out of a dictionary. Every entry is a base form — no plurals, no past tenses, no proper nouns — and the selection favours words a fluent speaker recognises immediately. A full English dictionary runs into six figures, and most of it is technical, archaic or an inflected form of something else. Draw from that and you get words nobody can sketch, act out or put in a sentence, which fails every job people actually arrive here to do.

172 of the nouns and verbs are marked by hand as drawable or actable: anchor and juggle are in, ambition and assume are not. That marking is a judgement made while building the list, not a measurement, and you may fairly disagree with parts of it. It is what lets the tool produce a Pictionary deck without a house rule for skipping impossible cards.

Four jobs, four sets of settings

Writing prompts. Ask for three nouns and one adjective with repeats off, then treat them as constraints rather than a plot. The awkward combinations pull more weight than the tidy ones. Pictionary and charades. Switch on the drawable filter, set the count to the number of cards you need and download the list instead of reading it off a screen the other players can see. Vocabulary and ESL practice. The length filter is a rough proxy for difficulty and a loose one — length tracks difficulty only weakly and there is no frequency data behind this list, so read the output before you hand it to a class. Memorable phrases. For a wifi name, a project codename or a mnemonic, the hyphenated output gives you the shape of a passphrase. Read the next section before you treat it as one.

Frequently asked questions

Is this strong enough for a passphrase?

Only for something low-stakes. Words are drawn with crypto.getRandomValues, and the raw random bits are folded into the pool size by rejection sampling — draws that fall in the uneven remainder are discarded and taken again — so no word in the pool is favoured over another. The weakness is the pool, not the draw. All 524 words give about 9 bits per word: five words is roughly 45 bits, six is roughly 54. The EFF's long diceware list holds 7776 words, or 12.9 bits each, which puts six words nearer 77 bits — a different order of difficulty entirely. If a passphrase protects something you care about, generate it in a password manager, or with a printed diceware list and a real die, rather than on a web page whose source you have not read. Including this one.

Why does the same word keep coming up?

Almost always because the pool has shrunk. With repeats allowed, collisions become likely as soon as the pool is anywhere near the number of words you are asking for. Turning off repeats guarantees no word appears twice inside a single batch, but batches are independent of each other: press generate twice against a twelve-word pool and overlap is certain. Widen the length range or clear the starting letter and watch the counter recover.

Are the parts of speech reliable?

Mostly, with a caveat English forces on anyone who tries this: a large share of common words are both noun and verb. Every entry here is filed under exactly one tag — the sense chosen when the list was built — so the tool will never hand you the same word twice under two labels, but it also will not tell you that point, stack or wave work as either. For grammar teaching, check the output before the lesson.

Does anything I do here get uploaded?

No. The word list is embedded in this page's JavaScript and the draw happens on your device, so pressing generate makes no network request and the tool keeps working if your connection drops. Nothing is stored either — reload and the filters return to their defaults.

Known limits

English only, base forms only, and no definitions, pronunciations or frequency ranks. The list is small on purpose, which is the right trade for prompts and party games and the wrong one for cryptography. There is no way to load your own vocabulary, so for a themed set — food, anatomy, this week's spelling words — you will want a tool that accepts a custom list.