Random word generator
Drawn in your browser · nothing stored
Draw one word or twenty, chosen uniformly from 104,930 English words of three to nine letters. The list comes down once and everything after that happens in the page. Useful for writing prompts, word games, brainstorming and testing.
How to draw random words
Drawing from a full dictionary rather than a hand-picked list of common words changes what you get, and mostly for the better. A curated list gives you words you already think with; a full dictionary throws up things you had forgotten existed, which is the entire point of a random prompt. The cost is the occasional obscurity: you will meet words you would not use. For a brainstorming exercise that is a feature, and for anything that has to be recognised by a reader it is worth drawing a few and keeping the one that lands.
The length surprise
A uniform draw over a dictionary is not a uniform draw over word lengths, and the imbalance is much larger than people expect. The pool holds 1,142 three-letter words against 28,841 of nine letters. More than half of it is eight or nine letters long, so most of what you draw will be long, and short words feel rare because they are: about one word in ninety is a three-letter one. If you specifically want short words, draw a batch and discard, or use the unscrambler, which is organised by length. The dictionary file also carries 121 two-letter words, which this page leaves out of the draw — which is why the count under the result reads 104,930 rather than the 105,051 in the file.
Where the obscurity comes from
The list is Webster’s Second International, the public-domain dictionary that ships as the system word file on Unix machines. It was compiled in the 1930s, which is why archaic and technical entries turn up as readily as everyday ones: the draw is uniform over the dictionary, not over how often anyone says these words. That is the right behaviour for a prompt and the wrong one for anything a reader has to recognise on sight.
One consequence worth stating plainly: 105,051 words means each independent draw carries about 16.7 bits, so five drawn words is roughly 83 bits of entropy. That is a genuinely strong passphrase, but this page draws with replacement and keeps no record of what it gave you. If a password is the goal, the password generator is built for it.
What people use it for
- Setting a writing prompt against a blank page
- Throwing an unrelated noun into a stalled brainstorm
- Running a round of charades or Pictionary without the cards
- Filling a form or a search box with real words rather than lorem ipsum
- Picking vocabulary to define in a language lesson
Questions
Webster’s Second International, the public-domain list that ships as the system dictionary on Unix machines. It is downloaded to your browser once, about 215 KB, and used locally after that.
104,930, covering every length from three to nine letters, and the panel prints that figure under the result. The dictionary file holds 105,051 down to two letters; the two-letter words are left out of the draw here.
Because most of the dictionary is. There are twenty-five times as many nine-letter entries as three-letter ones, and more than half the list is eight or nine letters.
Not particularly. The draw is uniform over the dictionary rather than over usage, so a word nobody has said since 1930 is as likely as one you use daily.
Not on this page. Every length from three to nine letters is in the pool, and the unscrambler is the tool organised by length.
Use the seed box. The same seed and count give the same words.
Yes, each word is drawn independently, so repeats are possible in a large batch.
The arithmetic is: about 16.7 bits per word, so five words is near 83 bits. It draws with replacement and stores nothing, though, so the password generator is the better-suited tool.