Spin the wheel
Put your names in the box, press spin, and let the wheel decide in front of everybody. Weighted entries, remove-the-winner for multi-draw rounds, and a team splitter. Nothing you type leaves this page — the list stays in your own browser.
Why a wheel beats a random number
A generator that prints "7" answers the question and convinces nobody. A wheel answers the same question in a way a room can watch happen, and that difference is the entire point of the tool. When thirty people are looking at a screen, what makes the result stick is that everyone saw the same thing at the same time, with no opportunity for anyone to have run it twice and kept the second answer.
That is why this page is built around the spin rather than around the result. The wheel is drawn from your actual list, the pointer lands where the maths says it lands, and the winner is announced in text underneath — so nobody has to squint at a colour to know what happened.
Weighting entries with `name:weight`
Add a colon and a number to any line to give it a bigger slice. Pizza:3 takes three times the space of Sushi, and is three times as likely to win. Weights can be decimals — Pizza:2.5 works — and every line without one counts as 1.
The split happens at the last colon on the line, and only when what follows it is a positive number. So Team A: red team keeps its colon and its full label, because a name containing a colon is far more common than a mistyped weight, and quietly reinterpreting one as the other would change the odds without telling you.
Weighting is the honest way to run a draw where some people bought more tickets, some students have not been picked yet, or one option is genuinely meant to be the favourite. Faking it by pasting a name eight times works too and is easier to explain to a room — the wheel treats eight identical lines as eight separate slices, which is exactly the same odds and much more obvious to anyone watching.
What happens to your list
The wheel runs in JavaScript on the page you are already looking at. There is no upload, no account and no server that could keep your list — the site makes no external requests at all, which you can confirm in your browser's network tab.
Your entries are saved in your browser's local storage so the list is still there tomorrow morning, on the same computer and in the same browser. That storage never leaves the machine and is not readable by us. Clearing your browser data removes it; so does emptying the box.
This matters more here than on most tools. A class list is thirty real children's names, and a school has rules about where those are allowed to be typed. The answer for this page is that they go nowhere.
What a weight does to the odds
Four entries where two carry a weight. Every figure below is produced by the same code that lays out the wheel you just spun, so the table cannot drift from the tool.
| Line you type | Weight | Slice width | Chance of winning |
|---|---|---|---|
Pizza:3 | 3 | 154.3° | 42.9% |
Sushi | 1 | 51.4° | 14.3% |
Ramen:2 | 2 | 102.9° | 28.6% |
Tacos | 1 | 51.4° | 14.3% |
Seven entries with no weights would each take 51.4° and win one time in seven. Weights only change the share; the total is always the whole circle.
Common questions
How do I spin the wheel?
Type or paste your entries into the box, one per line, then press the Spin button. The wheel turns for a few seconds and the winner appears underneath in text as well as under the pointer.
Is the wheel actually random?
The winner is chosen first, by your browser's random number generator weighted by your entries, and the wheel is then spun to land on it. That order is what guarantees the picture matches the result. It is not cryptographically secure randomness, which no draw of this kind needs.
How many names can I put on the wheel?
There is no fixed limit. Past roughly a hundred entries the slices get too thin to print a readable name in, so labels are dropped from the drawing while the list underneath stays complete and the pick stays correct.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Once the page has loaded, yes. Everything runs locally, so an unreliable classroom or conference connection does not stop a spin that has already loaded.