Random Letter Generator

Three settings and one button are all there is.

1. Set How many, from 1 to 26. One letter suits a quick game round, while 26 gives a full alphabet.
2. Choose Letter case: Uppercase, Lowercase or Mixed. In Mixed, each letter is independently made capital or small with equal chance.
3. Tick No repeats if each letter may appear only once.
4. Click Generate letter. Several letters are shown on one line, separated by spaces.
5. Copy the result, or press the button again for a new draw.

The limit of 26 applies even when repeats are allowed.

Mixed case is a display choice only, and Copy takes exactly what you see, so the letters keep their capitals. The result sits on one line. If you want a column instead, paste it into a text editor and swap the spaces for line breaks.

Each letter is chosen with the browser's secure random generator, so each of the 26 letters has the same chance, 1 in 26 or about 3.85 per cent, on every draw. Earlier draws have no effect on later ones. Real English text is nothing like this: e, t and a are far commoner than q, x and z, so a uniform draw hands out awkward letters much more often than a word list would.

With No repeats ticked, the alphabet is shuffled and the first letters are dealt, so a count of 26 returns every letter once in random order. With repeats allowed, each letter is a fresh draw. Duplicates then turn up more often than you might expect: in five letters, the chance of at least one repeat is about 34 per cent. A result such as K T K A R is therefore ordinary rather than faulty.

The tool covers only the 26 letters of the English alphabet. It does not offer accented letters or other scripts, so for those, put your own characters in the random choice picker, one per line.

A few more odds, all for uniform draws. A single letter is one of the five vowels A, E, I, O or U with a chance of 5 in 26, about 19 per cent, so a consonant is roughly four times as likely. When three letters are drawn with repeats allowed, the chance that all three differ is 26 x 25 x 24 over 26 cubed, which is 15,600 out of 17,576, or about 89 per cent. These figures are why a short run of draws can look streaky without anything being wrong with the generator.

A single random letter makes a good starting point for several activities.

• Word games: name a country, animal or food that begins with the letter, or play categories rounds against a timer. The countdown timer works well for this.
• Alphabet practice: ask children to name the letter, say its sound or find an object that begins with it. The phonetic spelling generator and the NATO alphabet translator show how letters are spoken.
• Writing: begin a story with a word starting with the letter, or build an acrostic from several.
• Assigning turns: give each player a letter and draw one.

A simple categories round runs like this: draw one letter, set a 60 second timer, and have every player write a name for each of five categories that begins with that letter. Players score a point for an answer nobody else wrote. For spelling practice, Mixed case helps learners recognise the same letter in both forms, while Uppercase is clearer on a projector.

If a letter such as Q or X is too hard for the group, simply redraw. To change the style of a result, the upper case converter will transform it, and for numbers instead of letters see the random number generator. Everything runs in your browser and no draws are stored.