List Randomizer

Quick answers

What does a list randomizer do?

A list randomizer shuffles every item in your list into a new random order and gives you the whole list back. It is for deciding an order — speaking turns, task queues, running orders — rather than picking a single winner.

That full-order difference is the point. A picker answers “which one?”; a randomizer answers “in what order?”. Because the shuffle repositions every item, you can work straight down the result: first line goes first, second line goes second, and the order carries no trace of how the list was originally arranged.

Is the shuffle actually fair?

Yes. The tool uses a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling, which makes every possible ordering of the list equally likely and avoids the front-loaded bias of naive shuffles.

Fisher-Yates earns its reputation because the maths is simple to check: each item is swapped into place with a uniform choice among the positions still open, so no ordering is favoured. The rejection sampling step matters too — random values in the tiny uneven tail are drawn again instead of being rounded into place, which removes the modulo bias that quietly skews quick-and-dirty shuffles.

Does randomizing remove duplicate lines?

Only if you tick the remove-duplicates option. With it on, repeated lines are dropped before the shuffle, keeping the first copy of each; with it off, duplicates stay and each copy is shuffled like any other item.

Both behaviours have their uses. Duplicates in a pasted rota or class list are usually accidents, and de-duplication fixes them in the same pass. But sometimes the repeats are real — two different people who share a first name, for instance — and then you want them kept. The item count under the result shows exactly how many lines came out, so you can confirm the option did what you expected.

How to use

1. Paste or type your list in the top box, one item per line. Blank lines are ignored.
2. Tick Number the output if you want 1., 2., 3. in front of each line, and Remove duplicates if repeated lines should be dropped first.
3. Press Randomize — the whole list is shuffled and appears in the output box, with the item count underneath.
4. Press Copy to take the result with you, and press Randomize again any time you want a different order.

About this tool

Under the hood it runs a Fisher-Yates shuffle, the standard algorithm for this job: walk the list from the last item to the second, and swap each item with a randomly chosen item at or before its position. Done that way, every possible ordering of the list is equally likely — no item drifts towards the front and no original pairing survives by accident. The random positions come from the browser’s cryptographic random source, with rejection sampling on top, so the swaps are not quietly skewed by rounding the way a casual shuffle is.

Two options cover the lists people actually paste. Numbering writes 1., 2., 3. in front of each line of the result, ready to paste into a doc or a message as a finished order. De-duplication removes repeated lines before shuffling — pasted lists pick up duplicates all the time, and a name appearing twice in a turn order is exactly the kind of thing nobody notices until it causes an argument. The count under the result always tells you how many items came out, so a dropped line is easy to spot. If you only need one item picked rather than a full order, the Random Picker does that, and if your real job is tidying a list into alphabetical or length order instead, Sort Lines is the tool for that — both are linked under the result.

Everything happens in your browser. The list you paste is never uploaded, sent anywhere or stored; it exists only in this page until you close the tab. No account, no history, no copy kept on a server.

Frequently asked questions

More free tools