Who goes first
Board games, presentations, a stand-up rota.
Amira Ben Chen Dara
Wheel spinner for any list
Edit the entries list · click the wheel or press Ctrl+Enter
6 on the wheel · each has a 16.7% chance
or click the wheel · Ctrl+Enter spins while you type
About this tool
Type one option per line, press spin, and the wheel picks one at random. Names for a raffle, chores for the weekend, the order of play in a board game. Your list stays in this tab and is never uploaded.
- Entry format
- 1/line
- Spin shortcut
- Ctrl+↵
- Odds per entry
- Equal
- Sign-ups
- 0
Entries
- 1Amira
- 2Ben
- 3Chen
- 4Dara
- 5Eli
- 6Fen
Ready-made lists
Four lists worth copying
Select a list, copy it, and paste it over the example entries. Each line becomes one slice.
Weekend chores
Spin once per person; delete each chore as it is taken.
Bins & recycling Hoover downstairs Bathroom Laundry Food shop
Dinner shortlist
Keep it to the places everyone has already agreed to.
Thai Pizza Cook at home Ramen Tacos
Table groups
Assign a table to each student as they walk in.
Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5 Table 6
Raffles & giveaways
Running a draw people will trust
- 1
Show the list before you spin
Share your screen or project the page with the Entries box visible. People accept a result far more readily when they have seen their own name go in.
- 2
Use one line per ticket, not per person
If someone bought three tickets, enter their name three times. Each line is one slice and one equal chance, so the wheel does the weighting for you without any hidden settings.
- 3
Remove each winner before the next prize
Tick “Remove winner after each spin” so nobody can win twice. The Results tab keeps the order and time of every winner, and downloads as a CSV if anyone asks later.
- 4
Decide re-spin rules in advance
Agree beforehand what happens if a winner is absent. “Spin again” is fine, as long as it was the rule before the first spin and not after an unpopular result.
Step by step
How to use the wheel spinner
Six steps, and most people only ever need the first and the fourth.
- 01
Type or paste the list
One entry per line in the Entries box. Paste a column straight out of a spreadsheet and each cell lands on its own line. Blank lines are ignored and spaces at either end are trimmed, so a messy paste still produces a clean wheel.
- 02
Tidy it if you need to
Shuffle reorders the wedges, Sort A–Z alphabetises them, and Dedupe removes repeated entries, ignoring capital letters. Every one of these can be reversed with Undo until you type again.
- 03
Choose the settings
Tick “Remove winner after each spin” for a draw where nobody can win twice. Pick a spin speed: quick when you are working through a long list, slow when the suspense is half the point. Sound can be switched off for a quiet room.
- 04
Spin
Click the wheel, press the orange button, or press Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) from anywhere on the page, including while you are still typing in the list.
- 05
Act on the result
The pop-up shows the winner in full. Spin again from there, or press “Remove it” to take that entry off the wheel without turning on elimination mode for every spin.
- 06
Keep a record
The Results tab lists every spin in order with the time it happened. Copy it, download it as a text file or a CSV for a spreadsheet, or clear it and start again.
Your list is saved in this browser as you type, so closing the tab and coming back tomorrow brings the same wheel back. It is stored on your device only. Clearing the box, or clearing your browser’s site data, removes it.
Getting a list in
Pasting from spreadsheets, documents and chats
The quickest route for a long list is copy and paste. From Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers, select a single column and paste: each cell becomes a line. From a document or an email, make sure each name sits on its own line first. A comma-separated sentence such as “Ana, Ben, Chloe” pasted into the box stays as one entry, because a comma can legitimately be part of an entry (“Smith, J.”).
If you already have a file, use Import. It accepts plain text and CSV files up to 200 KB. When importing, commas, semicolons and tabs are treated as separators, since that is what they mean in a CSV. If your CSV has a header row such as “Name”, delete that line from the box after importing so it does not end up on the wheel.
Export does the reverse and downloads the current entries as a text file, one per line. It is the simplest way to keep a class list or a team roster between sessions on different devices, or to hand the same wheel to a colleague.
Limits, and why they exist
The wheel holds up to 200 entries of up to 80 characters each. Anything past those limits is set aside, and a note under the box tells you how much. The cap is about legibility, not fairness. With 200 wedges each one is under two degrees wide and its label is a few pixels tall. The draw is still exactly as fair, but nobody watching can check where the pointer stopped. For a raffle with more tickets than that, number the tickets and build the winning number one digit at a time: put 0 to 9 on the wheel and spin once per digit. Three spins give a number from 000 to 999, and every number is equally likely.
Long entries are shortened on the wedge itself with an ellipsis, because a wedge has only so much room. The pop-up, the Results tab and every export always show the full text you typed.
Draws without repeats
Elimination mode and full random orders
Many real uses need each person to come up once: presentation order, Secret Santa assignments, the sequence of turns in a tournament. Spinning a normal wheel ten times for ten people will almost never give you all ten names, because each spin is independent and repeats are allowed.
Tick Remove winner after each spin and the winning line is deleted from the list the moment the wheel stops. The next spin draws from whoever is left. Keep spinning until one entry remains and the Results tab now holds a complete random ordering of your list. Mathematically this is the same as shuffling a deck of cards: every possible order is equally likely, and no entry is favoured by where it started on the wheel.
Elimination edits your list, so export it first if you will need the full version again. If you forget, Undo will not help here, because each removal is a fresh edit, but the Results tab has every name that was removed, in order.
When you do not want elimination
Leave it off for anything where repeats are fine or even expected: choosing tonight’s dinner, picking a warm-up exercise, deciding who answers the next question in class. Removing entries there just shrinks the wheel for no reason, and the same student being picked twice in a lesson is an honest outcome of a random process, not a fault.
The maths
What a fair wheel actually looks like
Fair does not mean evenly spread. People expect a random wheel to visit every entry in turn, and it does not. These two tables show what to expect, so a run of repeats does not look like a broken wheel.
| Entries | Chance per spin | Spins to see them all |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 25.0% | 8.3 |
| 6 | 16.7% | 14.7 |
| 10 | 10.0% | 29.3 |
| 20 | 5.0% | 72.0 |
| 30 | 3.3% | 119.8 |
| Entries | Left out of 10 spins | Same result twice in a row |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5.6% | 25.0% |
| 6 | 16.2% | 16.7% |
| 10 | 34.9% | 10.0% |
| 20 | 59.9% | 5.0% |
| 30 | 71.2% | 3.3% |
Two consequences are worth knowing before you use the wheel in front of people. First, with six entries you need about fifteen spins on average before everyone has had a turn, and some sessions will take far longer. If equal turns matter, use elimination mode instead of hoping it evens out. Second, the wheel has no memory. A name that has just won is exactly as likely to win the next spin as any other. Back-to-back repeats are normal, and with four entries they happen on a quarter of all spins.
Behind the animation, the winner is chosen first with the browser’s random number generator, and the wheel is then turned so that the pointer comes to rest inside that entry’s wedge, at a slightly different spot each time. The number of full turns and the exact stopping point are cosmetic. They make no difference to which entry wins.
Unequal odds, honestly
Giving some entries a bigger chance
Sometimes unequal odds are the point. A raffle where each ticket bought is one entry, a reward chart where a student who completed three tasks gets three chances, a dinner wheel where pizza is twice as welcome as soup. The honest way to do this is to repeat an entry: each extra line adds another wedge, and the chance of winning is simply the number of lines with that name divided by the total number of lines.
So a wheel with “Ana” on three lines, “Ben” on two and “Chloe” on one gives Ana 3 in 6 (50%), Ben 2 in 6 (33.3%) and Chloe 1 in 6 (16.7%). The box underneath the list shows the per-line chance, and it also warns you when a list contains duplicates, so a repeated name you pasted by mistake does not quietly double someone’s odds. If the duplicates were an accident, Dedupe removes them in one click.
What the wheel will not do is hide the weighting. Every wedge is visible, and everyone can count them. If you need a wheel that lands where you choose, for a magic trick or a party game where the host is in on it, that is a different tool, and it is clearly labelled: the rigged wheel spinner.
In front of a group
Using the wheel with a class, a team or a crowd
A wheel works because everybody can see it is impartial. A few habits keep it that way.
- Match elimination to the rules you announced. If you said nobody wins twice, tick it before the first spin, not after the first repeat.
- Use the slow speed for stakes, quick for routine. Seven seconds of spinning builds suspense for a prize draw. For picking who reads the next paragraph, two seconds keeps the lesson moving.
- Keep the log. Download the Results tab as a CSV after a draw that matters. It records the order and the time of every spin, which settles any later question about who won what.
- Mind the volume. The tick and chime are fun at a party and less fun in a shared office. The sound switch sits next to the speed setting.
For a single question with only two outcomes, the yes or no wheel is quicker to set up. For deciding who answers in a quiz, pair this wheel with the capital city quiz or guess the flag.
If something looks wrong
Troubleshooting the wheel
The wheel will not spin
It needs at least two entries. If the box looks full but the count says one or zero, the list is probably on a single line separated by commas. Put each entry on its own line, or save it as a .csv file and use Import, which splits on commas.
An entry seems to win too often
Check the note under the list for duplicates. A name pasted twice has two wedges and twice the chance. Dedupe removes the extra copies. If there are no duplicates, you are probably seeing an ordinary streak: with five entries, the same one wins two spins in a row a fifth of the time.
My list disappeared
Lists are saved in your browser, so they will not follow you to another device or another browser, and they are not kept in a private window. Clearing site data or browsing history also removes them. Use Export to keep a copy of any list you rely on.
There is no sound
Check that Sound is on in Settings and that the device is not muted. Browsers can also mute a single tab: look for a crossed-out speaker on the tab itself, or in the site settings reached from the address bar.
Copy says “blocked”
Your browser refused clipboard access, which happens on some managed school and work devices. Download the results as a .txt file instead; it contains exactly the same text.
Know when to stop
What this wheel is not for
The randomness comes from your browser’s built-in generator. It is unpredictable enough for games, classrooms, chores and giveaways among friends, and nothing about a spin can be influenced from the page. It is not a certified random number generator of the kind used for regulated lotteries, gambling or legally binding prize draws. Many countries have specific rules for promotional competitions, including who may run the draw and how it must be recorded. If prizes have real monetary value or a business is running the draw, check the rules that apply where you are before relying on any website, this one included.
It also does not pick for you in the sense of knowing anything. A wheel is useful when the options really are equally acceptable and the hard part is committing to one. If one option is clearly better, the honest move is to choose it and skip the spin.
Privacy
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The list is kept in your browser’s local storage so it survives a refresh, and the results log lives only in the open tab. There is no account to create and no record of your spins on any server. The details are in the privacy policy.
FAQ
Wheel spinner questions
Is every entry equally likely?
Yes, every line has the same chance. The winner is chosen first by picking one line at random, and the wheel is then turned to stop on it. The length of an entry, its colour and its position make no difference. The only way to change the odds is to put the same entry on more than one line, and the page warns you when that has happened.
How many entries can I add?
Up to 200 entries of up to 80 characters each. The limit keeps every wedge large enough to see where the pointer stops. Lines past the limit are ignored, and a note under the list says so.
How do I stop the same name winning twice?
Tick “Remove winner after each spin” in Settings. Each winner is deleted from the list as soon as the wheel stops, and the Results tab keeps the full order. To remove a single winner without turning on elimination, press “Remove it” in the result pop-up.
Is my list saved?
Yes, on your own device. The entries are saved in this browser’s local storage as you type, so they are still there after a refresh or a restart. They are never uploaded. In a private window, or with site data blocked, the wheel simply starts with the example list each time.
Can I import a list from Excel or Google Sheets?
Copy a single column and paste it into the Entries box: each cell becomes one entry. You can also use Import with a .txt or .csv file up to 200 KB, where commas, semicolons and tabs are treated as separators.
Can I download the results?
Yes. Open the Results tab to copy every spin, or download it as a .txt file or a .csv file with the order and time of each spin. Export on the Entries tab downloads the list itself.
Why is my entry cut short on the wheel?
The label on a wedge is shortened so it fits inside the slice, and the more entries you have, the shorter it gets. The pop-up, the Results tab and every export always show the full text.
Is there a keyboard shortcut?
Ctrl+Enter, or Cmd+Enter on a Mac, spins the wheel from anywhere on the page, including while you are typing in the list. Escape closes the result pop-up.
Can I make some entries more likely to win?
Put an entry on more than one line. Each line is one wedge, so an entry on three lines out of ten has a 30% chance. If you need a wheel that always lands on a chosen entry, use the Rigged Wheel Spinner, which is built and labelled for exactly that.
Is it suitable for an official prize draw?
It is fine for informal giveaways, classrooms and games. It uses the browser’s standard random number generator, not a certified one, so for regulated lotteries or prize draws with significant value, follow the legal requirements where you live.