Random letter generator
One outcome in 26
Drawn in your browser · nothing stored
Each of the twenty-six letters has exactly a one in twenty-six chance. Draw one, or draw a handful at once for a game, a prompt or a naming scheme.
How to draw random letters
Even weighting is the thing to be aware of, because it is nothing like how letters behave in English. Peter Norvig’s count over 743.8 billion words of the Google Books corpus puts E at 12.49% of all letters and Z at 0.09%, so in real text E is about a hundred and forty times commoner. An even draw is therefore the wrong tool for anything meant to look like a word, and exactly the right one for anything meant to be impartial.
Starting letters are a different distribution again
This catches people out when they draw a letter to name something. The letters that begin words are not the letters that fill them. Norvig’s figures put T, A and O at the front of the word-initial list, while E, the commonest letter in the language overall, is roughly four times rarer at the start of a word than it is elsewhere. Draw an E as an opening letter and you have asked for something genuinely harder than the frequency table suggests.
If you are here for Scattergories
The boxed game does not use twenty-six letters. Its die has twenty faces and leaves out Q, U, V, X, Y and Z, on the grounds that too few common words start with them for a round to be playable. Drawing from the full alphabet here gives you a harder game than the one in the box, which is fine if everyone knows, and unfair if only the person pressing the button does.
Repeats inside a batch are ordinary rather than a fault. Each letter is drawn independently, so a draw of five contains at least one repeat about a third of the time. If you need five different letters, draw again rather than assuming the generator is stuck.
What people use it for
- Calling the letter for a round of Scattergories
- Setting a drawing or writing prompt fixed to one letter
- Picking a starting letter for a name or a naming scheme
- Choosing at random among options already lettered A to Z
- Drawing letters for a spelling or phonics exercise
Questions
Yes, one in twenty-six each. That is deliberately unlike English text, where E is about a hundred and forty times commoner than Z.
Yes. Each draw is independent, so a batch of five contains a repeat roughly a third of the time.
Twenty of the twenty-six. The die omits Q, U, V, X, Y and Z, so a full-alphabet draw is a harder round than the boxed game intends.
Not a representative one. Words beginning with T, A or O are far commoner than the overall frequency table implies, and E is about four times rarer at the start of a word than elsewhere.
Not on this page. The random picker will draw from any list you paste, including a custom alphabet.
Type a seed before drawing. The same seed always gives the same draw, which is how two people can run the same round apart.
No, just the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet.
Your browser’s cryptographic generator, with values that would skew the range rejected rather than folded back into it by a modulus.