Random word generator · Free · Nothing uploaded
Random Word Generator
A random word generator picks words from a word list by chance. This one draws from the EFF Large Wordlist of 7,776 everyday English words, using your browser’s cryptographic random numbers, so every word that fits your filters has the same chance. It never repeats a word unless you allow it, and it shows how many words fit.
With no filters, each word has a 1 in 7,776 chance; set 5 letters and it is 1 in 927.
Press New words to draw. Settings and words are kept in this browser only.
More filters and output
- Words that fit
- 7,776
- Each word’s chance
- 1 in 7,776
- Bits per word
- 12.9
- Chance of a repeat
- None: repeats off
Five words are drawn the first time the page opens. Set how many, their length and their letters; tap a word to keep it, and New words redraws the rest.
A random word generator chooses words from a fixed list by chance, so that no word is chosen by a person. How random the result is depends on the list it draws from and on how it picks a position in that list.
- No sign-up
- Nothing uploaded
- List named
- Works offline
- No repeats unless you ask
Key facts
| Detail | Answer |
|---|---|
| Price | Free, no sign-up, nothing to install |
| Word list | EFF Large Wordlist (2016), 7,776 words, CC BY 4.0 |
| Word lengths | 3 to 9 letters |
| Random numbers | crypto.getRandomValues, without modulo bias |
| Repeats | None unless you allow them |
| Words at a time | 1 to 1,000 |
| Each word’s chance | 1 in the number that fit, shown as you filter |
| Where the words are kept | This browser only |
How to generate random words
Set how many and which kind, draw, keep the ones you like, copy them.
Set how many words
Type a number from 1 to 1,000 into How many words.
Set the length and letters
Fewest and most letters, and Starts with; more filters are under More filters and output.
Read how many words fit
Words that fit and each word’s chance change as you set the filters.
Press New words
The words appear in the box, drawn in your browser.
Keep the ones you want
Tap a word to keep it, then press New words to redraw the others.
Copy the words
Copy the words puts them on your clipboard, in the format chosen under Copy as.
What people draw random words for
Anywhere a word should come from chance rather than from the person choosing it.
Pictionary and charades
Words to draw or act out, picked so that nobody at the table chose them. Concrete everyday words are what the list favours.
Writing prompts
Three or five words to build a story, a poem or a scene around.
Brainstorming
A word from outside the problem to force a new angle in a meeting or a design session.
Naming
A team, a project, a Wi-Fi network or a character, from two words put side by side.
Spelling and vocabulary
Words for a spelling test or a vocabulary game, with the ones you do not want left out.
Word games
Five-letter words for practice, or a word with some letters already ruled out.
Passphrases
Six words drawn from the whole list, as EFF recommends, with the dice codes shown.
Test data
Placeholder words for a form, a database or a design mock-up.
Where the words come from: the EFF list, its licence and its limits
Every word this page can give you comes from one list: the EFF Large Wordlist, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in July 2016 and written by Joseph Bonneau. It has 7,776 words, and it is bundled here unchanged, in EFF’s own order. Its licence is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, which allows anyone to copy and reuse it provided the source is named, as it is here. Download the words that fit, under the filters, saves the list, or the part of it that fits your settings, as a text file with that credit at the top.
EFF built the list for passphrases that people can remember and type, which makes it a good list for games and prompts too. In EFF’s description, it started from word data collected by Ghent University’s Center for Reading Research, kept words of 3 to 9 characters, and put the most widely recognised and then the most concrete words first. It removed as many profane, insulting, sensitive or emotionally charged words as it could find, words that are hard to spell, and homophones, and made sure that no word is the start of another.
| Letters | Words | Share | For example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 82 | 1.1% | aim, fox, lid, pug |
| 4 | 468 | 6.0% | able, dupe, last, saga |
| 5 | 927 | 12% | abide, debit, lived, silly |
| 6 | 1,373 | 18% | abacus, domain, moaner, sesame |
| 7 | 1,591 | 20% | abdomen, drained, mortify, shindig |
| 8 | 1,779 | 23% | abnormal, doorbell, manicure, sensuous |
| 9 | 1,556 | 20% | abdominal, dreamlike, mountable, shortwave |
Letters means the letters a to z, so the hyphen in drop-down is not counted. 4 words carry a hyphen; untick Include words with a hyphen to leave them out. A few things follow from how the list was made, and they decide whether it suits you:
No word shorter than 3 letters or longer than 9. Nothing like an, and nothing like strawberries.
American spelling, as in aluminum and armored.
Everyday forms: plurals, past tenses and -ing words are words in their own right here (aging, agreed, angles), and a few names are written in small letters (april, atlantic).
Not every unsuitable word is gone. EFF says it removed as many as it could; a teacher may still not want badass on a class screen. Put any word you do not want into Words to leave out and it is never drawn; the count of words that fit drops by one.
How the words are picked: no favourites, no repeats
A random word generator is only as random as the way it chooses a position in its list. Most do not say how. This one does three things, all in your browser:
The random numbers come from
crypto.getRandomValues, the browser’s cryptographic generator, which the Web Cryptography API defines for keys and secrets. MDN’s reference notes thatMath.random(), the usual shortcut, does not provide cryptographically secure random numbers and should not be used for anything security related.Every word that fits has exactly the same chance. A random 32-bit number has 4,294,967,296 possible values, which does not divide evenly by 7,776: taking the remainder would make the first 2,560 words come up about 0.0002% more often than the rest (modulo bias). The tool throws away any draw from the top 2,560 values and draws again, so the chance is exactly 1 in the number of words that fit. It happens on fewer than 1 draw in a million.
No word comes up twice, unless you allow it. Each new word is drawn from the words not drawn yet, by a partial Fisher–Yates shuffle, so a list of 20 holds 20 different words and every set of 20 is equally likely. Tick Allow the same word twice and each word is drawn from the whole pool, independently of the others, as rolling dice does.
Keeping words. Tap a word to keep it, and New words redraws only the others; without repeats, a kept word is not drawn again. Bring back the last words undoes one draw. The words and the settings stay in this browser’s storage, so a reload shows the same words; nothing is sent anywhere.
How many words fit a filter, and each word’s chance
The board shows how many words fit your filters before you draw, and so the chance each one has: 1 in that number. Every filter narrows the pool, and a narrow pool repeats faster and is easier to guess. These are the counts for some common settings, from the list itself:
| Filters | Words that fit | Each word’s chance | Bits per word |
|---|---|---|---|
| No filters | 7,776 | 1 in 7,776 | 12.9 |
| 5 letters, the length Wordle uses | 927 | 1 in 927 | 9.9 |
| 3 or 4 letters | 550 | 1 in 550 | 9.1 |
| 9 letters | 1,556 | 1 in 1,556 | 10.6 |
| Starts with q | 37 | 1 in 37 | 5.2 |
| Starts with z, 5 letters | 3 | 1 in 3 | 1.6 |
| Ends with ing | 623 | 1 in 623 | 9.3 |
| Contains oo | 201 | 1 in 201 | 7.7 |
| Leave out e, a, r, s and t | 403 | 1 in 403 | 8.7 |
| 5 letters, none of e, a, r, s and t | 94 | 1 in 94 | 6.6 |
| Without hyphenated words | 7,772 | 1 in 7,772 | 12.9 |
Starts with, Ends with and Contains take letters in a row, so ing finds aging but not sign. Leave out these letters drops every word holding any of them, which is how to set up a word game where some letters are already ruled out. Capitals and spaces in the boxes are ignored.
First letters are far from even. s is the most common first letter in the list, with 1,087 words, and every letter starts at least one word. A letter game played on this list should know that before it is played:
| First letter | Words |
|---|---|
| a | 407 |
| b | 362 |
| c | 751 |
| d | 547 |
| e | 398 |
| f | 308 |
| g | 304 |
| h | 249 |
| i | 115 |
| j | 96 |
| k | 55 |
| l | 194 |
| m | 295 |
| n | 97 |
| o | 246 |
| p | 578 |
| q | 37 |
| r | 513 |
| s | 1,087 |
| t | 323 |
| u | 476 |
| v | 132 |
| w | 155 |
| x | 2 |
| y | 27 |
| z | 22 |
The chance of a repeat when repeats are allowed
With Allow the same word twice ticked, a repeat in a list is not a fault: it is what independent draws do, and it comes sooner than most people expect. It is the birthday problem, where 23 people are enough for an even chance that two share a birthday. The board shows the chance for your settings; here it is for the whole list and for the 927 five-letter words:
| Words drawn | From all 7,776 | From the 927 five-letter words |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 0.1% | 1.1% |
| 10 | 0.6% | 4.8% |
| 25 | 3.8% | 28% |
| 50 | 15% | 74% |
| 105 | 51% | 100% |
| 200 | 92% | over 99.9% |
From the whole list, 105 words drawn with repeats allowed are more likely than not to hold one twice. The chance is 1 minus n × (n − 1) × … × (n − k + 1) ÷ nk, for k words from n. With repeats off, which is the default, the chance is zero, and a request for more words than fit gives every word that fits, once each, in random order.
Dice codes and passphrases: what the bits mean
The list was made for dice. Five rolls of a six-sided die give a number from 11111 to 66666, and each of the 7,776 numbers names one word: 11111 is abacus, 66666 is zoom. Tick Show the dice codes to see each word’s number, which lets you check a list against real dice or roll your own.
Each word drawn at random from all 7,776 carries 12.9 bits, because 212.9 is 7,776. Words add up, so a passphrase of six words carries 77.5 bits, which is what EFF recommends for most uses:
| Words | Bits | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 51.7 | Shorter than EFF recommends |
| 5 | 64.6 | Shorter than EFF recommends |
| 6 | 77.5 | EFF’s recommendation for most uses |
| 7 | 90.5 | Longer than EFF recommends |
| 8 | 103.4 | Longer than EFF recommends |
The figure only holds if nothing is chosen by you. It counts on every word being drawn at random from the whole list and kept. Each filter shrinks the pool and the bits with it (the board shows bits per word for your settings). Drawing again until a phrase you like comes up, or keeping some words and redrawing the rest, makes the phrase easier to guess than the figure says. For a real password, use every word, draw once, and keep the phrase in a password manager; this page sends nothing anywhere, but it is a word generator, not a password manager.
What this random word generator does not do
| It does | It does not |
|---|---|
| Draw real English words from one named list of 7,776 | Make up new words, or draw from every word in English; there is no 2-letter or 10-letter word in it |
| Filter by length, first letters, last letters, letters in a row and letters to leave out | Sort words into nouns, verbs and adjectives: the list carries no such labels, and many of its words are more than one (bounce, blame, blend) |
| Count the words that fit, and state each word’s chance | Give definitions; a word you do not know needs a dictionary |
| Draw without repeats, or with them, and show the chance of one | Draw words in other languages, or in British spelling |
| Keep the words and settings in this browser only | Send them anywhere |
To put the words you drew in order, paste them into the alphabetizer; to count the words and characters in a text you wrote from them, use the word counter.
This generator, popular random word generators, or a passphrase generator
What you can find out about the words before you draw them.
| This generator | Popular random word generators | Passphrase generators | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word list named | EFF Large Wordlist, CC BY 4.0 | “Thousands of common words” | Usually an EFF list |
| Words that fit, counted | Yes, as you set the filters | No | No |
| How it picks | Stated: crypto.getRandomValues, no modulo bias | Not stated | Usually the Web Crypto API |
| Repeats | Off by default; chance shown when on | Not stated, or “no repeats” | Allowed |
| Length and letter filters | Length, first, last, in a row, left out | Some: length and first or last letter | No |
| Nouns, verbs, adjectives | No | Most offer them | No |
| Dice codes and bits | Yes | No | Bits, sometimes codes |
| The whole list to download | Yes, with its credit | No | Sometimes |
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Open alphabetize a list →Compare text
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Frequently asked questions
What is a random word?
A word chosen by chance from a list, rather than by a person. Nothing about the word itself makes it random: abacus is as random as zoom when both had the same chance of being drawn. What decides how random a list of words is, is the list it came from and the way each position in it was picked.
How many words does the random word generator use?
7,776, the whole EFF Large Wordlist, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2016 and bundled unchanged under its CC BY 4.0 licence. Every word has 3 to 9 letters. Filters narrow that pool, and the board shows how many words still fit, so you always know what each word’s chance is.
Can I generate words with specific letters?
Yes. Starts with, Ends with and Contains, in a row, take letters such as b, ing or oo, and Leave out these letters drops every word holding any letter you type. Fewest and most letters set the length. The filters combine, and the count of words that fit updates as you type, before you draw.
Can I get a random 5 letter word?
Yes: set Fewest letters and Most letters to 5. 927 of the list’s 7,776 words have five letters, so each has a 1 in 927 chance. Leave out these letters works for word games in which some letters are already ruled out. These are everyday words, not a list of any game’s answers.
Why did the same word come up twice?
Only because Allow the same word twice is ticked: then each word is drawn independently, as dice are, and repeats come sooner than expected. From the whole list, 105 words drawn that way are more likely than not to hold a repeat. With the setting off, the default, no word is drawn twice in one list.
Is the random word generator truly random?
It uses crypto.getRandomValues, the browser’s cryptographic random number generator, not Math.random, and throws away the few draws that would favour some words over others, so every word that fits has exactly the same chance. The randomness is as good as your browser’s; the words are only as varied as the list they come from.
Is every word in English in your random word generator?
No. It holds 7,776 words, chosen by EFF to be widely recognised, concrete and easy to spell, of 3 to 9 letters, in American spelling. Rare words, very short and very long words, and most names are not in it, which is why its words suit games and prompts. A full dictionary would give mostly words few people know.
Can it make random nouns, verbs or adjectives?
No. The EFF list does not label words by part of speech, and many of its words are more than one: bounce, blame and blend are nouns and verbs. Rather than label them by guesswork, the page leaves it out. For a set of nouns, draw a longer list and keep the ones that work as nouns for your purpose.
Can I use it to make a passphrase?
Yes, with care. Six words drawn from the whole list carry 77.5 bits, the strength EFF recommends, and Show the dice codes lets you check them against real dice. Use no filters, draw once and keep what comes: redrawing until you like a phrase makes it weaker than the figure says.
Is the random word generator free to use?
Yes, with no sign-up and no limit on draws. The words are drawn in your browser and kept in its storage on your device, so a reload shows the same words; nothing is sent to a server. Once the page has loaded it works offline.
Related guides
Longer answers to the questions behind the numbers.
- Counting
Why word counts differ between tools
The same sentence is 26 words to one counter and 39 to another. Four counting rules side by side, and how to meet a hard limit whichever one a form uses.
- Reference
Types of counters explained
Synchronous vs asynchronous, mod-N, ring and Johnson, industrial and PLC counters, plus mechanical and software counters.