Spin the Wheel

A wheel of names, and anything else you paste

This is a random name picker in the plainest sense: every line you type becomes one slice, and the pointer lands on exactly one of them. Most people arrive wanting a wheel of names — a class list, a team, everyone who entered a giveaway — but the wheel has no idea what the text means. Numbers, restaurants, chores, film titles and yes-or-no all behave identically.

The list is editable at all times, including after a spin. Paste over it, delete a few lines, or clear it and start again; the wheel redraws as you type, so what you see is always what will be drawn from. People call this kind of tool a spin wheel, a wheel spinner, a spinner wheel or a picker wheel more or less interchangeably, and they all mean the same thing: a circle divided into slices, and a pointer that stops on one of them.

Using it as a name wheel

A name wheel is the most common shape this takes: paste a register, a roster or a list of entrants, and let it choose. There is a distinction worth drawing, though, because two different jobs get described with the same words. Picking from names you already have is what this page does. Inventing names you do not have is a random name generator, which is a different tool — and if that is what you came for, the wheel can still do it, but you have to give it something to draw from first.

The practical version of that: paste a hundred candidate names into the list and spin to pick one. That combination — a random generator feeding a wheel — is how most people end up using it for naming a character, a pet or a team, and it is why the ready-made wheels above include several name sets you can spin straight away.

How this wheel spinner picks a winner

Most spinners work backwards. They spin the wheel by a random amount, let the animation run, and then read off whichever slice the pointer happens to stop on. It looks fair, and mostly it is, but the outcome is really being decided by the easing curve and by how floating-point rounding falls at a segment boundary — not by the random number at all.

This wheel does it the other way round. The winner is drawn first, from the cryptographic random number generator built into your browser, and only then is the rotation calculated to land the pointer on that slice. The animation is presentation; the draw already happened.

The draw itself uses rejection sampling rather than a plain remainder. Taking a random 32-bit number modulo the number of slices very slightly favours the first few slices whenever the slice count does not divide evenly into the range — a rounding artefact rather than a conspiracy, and invisible on a wheel of six. On the long lists people actually paste it grows, and discarding the short uneven tail of draws removes it completely at no cost.

What people use a spinner wheel for

In classrooms it decides who answers next, which is mostly a way of taking the choice away from the teacher so nobody feels singled out. For giveaways and raffles it draws a winner in front of the people who entered, which is the entire point — a name appearing in a box is an assertion, whereas a wheel slowing to a stop is something everyone watched happen.

The rest is smaller and more human. Groups use a picker wheel to settle where to eat without anyone having to own the decision. Streamers put viewer suggestions on it. People stuck between two reasonable options use it to find out which result they were quietly hoping for. That last one is not really randomness at all, and it is one of the most common reasons anyone spins anything.

Drawing without repeats

By default every spin is independent, so the same name can win twice in a row — which is correct behaviour, and the same reason a coin can land heads twice. When you need each entry to come up once, switch on Remove the winner after each spin. The winner is taken off the wheel, the remaining slices grow to fill the circle, and spinning until the list empties gives you a complete random order. That is the setting to use for drawing prize places, setting a presentation order, or dealing people into teams.

Nothing leaves your browser

The wheel makes no network requests while you use it, and that is checked mechanically before each release rather than simply claimed: the build fails if the shipped JavaScript contains any way to open a connection at all, or if any page loads from an origin other than the analytics tag described in the privacy policy. Your list is never uploaded, never stored on a server and never logged, because there is no server involved in the spinning, and the analytics tag never receives it. It also means the wheel keeps working if your connection drops after the page has loaded.