Spin the wheel

How the wheel picks a winner

Every entry gets a slice of exactly the same size, so every entry has exactly the same chance. When you press spin, your browser draws the winner first and the wheel is then told where to stop, which is why the pointer always lands squarely on a slice instead of on a line. Nothing is weighted, nothing is saved, and nobody is due a turn: each spin starts from scratch. If you want one name to come up more often, type it twice and it gets two slices.

Ways to use a spinning wheel

Teachers use it as a random name picker for questions, reading turns and classroom jobs. At home it settles what is for dinner, whose turn it is to do the dishes, and which film wins. At a party it draws raffle tickets and hands out prizes. Turn on "take the winner off the wheel" in Extras and the same wheel runs a draw all the way down to the last name, which is the quickest way to build a turn order for a game.

Your list stays yours

A class list is real people's names, so the part that matters runs entirely in your browser: the wheel itself, the spin, and the pick, with no account and no upload. This page is not one of the seven generator pages, so unlike those it carries Google's advertising script, though no advertisement is shown, and like every page here it carries our host's visit counter; see our privacy policy for exactly what that means. Your entries sit in this page's address, after the #, and the share link carries them inside the link itself. Browsers never send that part of an address to a server, so the link works everywhere, and it shows your list to everyone you send it to.

Prefer it on paper?

Make bingo cards, a word search, charades cards, a scavenger hunt or a seating chart, all free and with no watermark.

On the screen, the countdown timer runs rounds and activities, and the stopwatch times races and challenges. They are all listed together on the tools page.