About Name Spinner

Name Spinner is a free tool that does one job and does it properly: Paste your names, hit spin, and the wheel picks one at random. It works on a phone, keeps your list between visits, and runs entirely in your browser, so it still works when the school wifi does not. There is no sign-up, no advert covering the wheel, and no limit on how many times you spin.

Why this exists

Picking a name at random in front of a room is a small problem with a lot of bad solutions. Drawing from a hat needs a hat. Most wheels online sit behind a sign-up, cover half the screen with adverts, or take longer to load than the pick takes to make. This page is one file: it loads in well under a second, works on a phone, keeps your list for next time, and carries on working when the connection drops.

How the winner is chosen

The winning segment is selected before the wheel starts turning, using the browser's cryptographic random number generator, and the animation is then aimed at it. Doing it the other way round, flinging the wheel and reading off wherever it stops, lets frame timing and rounding leak into the odds. The conversion from a random number to a position in your list also discards the values that would introduce a remainder bias, so a list of ten names is exactly as fair as a list of eight. All of it runs in your browser and none of it is recorded.

What it is not

This is a random picker, not a system of record. It keeps no log of who was picked, produces no auditable trail, and stores nothing outside your own browser, so it cannot show afterwards that a draw was run correctly. That is fine for choosing who answers next and fine for an informal draw among people who trust each other. It is not enough on its own for a regulated prize promotion, which in many places requires published terms, a named promoter and evidence of how the winner was selected.