Random Choice Picker

There are two buttons and two settings.

1. Type or paste your options into the box, one per line. Spaces around each line are trimmed and blank lines are ignored.
2. Set How many to pick, from 1 to 100. It cannot exceed the number of options you entered.
3. Tick Remove picked options from the list if winners should leave the box, so the next draw cannot choose them again.
4. Click Pick for me. The choices appear one per line, with the first line drawn first, and a note such as "5 options in the hat" confirms how many entries were in play.
5. Click Shuffle list instead to reorder the box itself.

The picker keeps no history, so copy any winners you want to record.

The picker shuffles all the lines with a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the browser's secure random generator, then takes the first few. Every line therefore has the same chance, a 1 in 5 chance each for a list of five, and the first and last lines are no different from the middle ones. A draw of several options returns distinct lines.

Each line is its own entry, which gives you simple weighting. List Pizza three times and Salad once, and Pizza has a 75 per cent chance of being chosen. Two cautions follow from this. When you pick several options and the same text sits on more than one line, that text can appear twice in the result. And Remove picked options from the list deletes every line that matches a picked text, so all copies of a weighted option disappear together.

For a raffle, paste the entrants, keep How many to pick at 1, tick the remove option and press Pick for me once per prize. To make teams, press Shuffle list and split the reordered box: with eight names, the first four are one team and the last four the other. The shuffle button rewrites the box and drops blank lines, but shows nothing in the result area.

A neutral random draw ends many small arguments quickly.

• Giveaways: draw winners from a list of names, removing each as they win.
• Meals and plans: list the restaurants or films under consideration and let chance choose.
• Classrooms: pick who answers next or presents first without favouritism.
• Projects: choose the next article or task from a backlog.
• Order of play: shuffle players or speakers into a fair running order.

A quick example: type Anna, Ben, Chloe, Dev and Eli on five lines, set How many to pick to 2 and click Pick for me. You might see Dev and then Anna, and the note reads "5 options in the hat". Each person had a 2 in 5 chance of being among the two. If a list was copied from a spreadsheet, check for stray empty lines or repeated names first, since the picker treats every non-empty line as its own entry.

Tidy a pasted list first with the duplicate line remover, or arrange it with the alphabetical order tool if you want a tidy record. For numbers rather than names, the random number generator is the better fit, and the random name generator can supply sample names for a trial run. The word counter will confirm how many lines you pasted. Your list stays in your browser.

It is a plain picker, not a spinning wheel. It has no stored lists, no saved history, no pick weights other than repeated lines and no way to repeat an earlier draw, and at most 100 options can be picked at once. If an outcome has real consequences, such as a prize, let the people involved watch the draw and write the result down straight away.