Pick Names Out of a Hat

This tool lets you pick names out of a hat online, without the hat. You type or paste the names, the wheel puts one name on each segment, and a spin pulls a single name out. Turning on Remove entry after it is picked makes the draw behave like a real hat: each name that comes out stays out, so spinning ten times through ten names gives you all ten in a random order and never the same name twice.

A paper hat does three things at once. It hides the names, it mixes them, and it takes one out without putting it back. This page does all three, and it does the last two better, because paper slips fold unevenly and hands reach for the same corner of the bowl. The one thing paper does that a screen cannot is sit on a table in front of everybody, so this wheel adds a Hide names on the wheel switch that replaces every label with a question mark until the result appears.

How to Pick Names Out of a Hat Online

The whole process takes about twenty seconds, and most of that is pasting the list.

1. Open Edit the list. The editor sits in the panel beside the wheel and opens with ten placeholder names in it.
2. Paste your names, one per line. A column copied out of a spreadsheet pastes straight in. The wheel takes up to 100 names.
3. Press Apply to wheel. The segments redraw with your names on them, and the line under the buttons reads how many are in the hat.
4. Turn on Remove entry after it is picked. This is what makes it a hat draw rather than a repeating spinner. Leave it off if you want every name eligible on every spin.
5. Spin. Press the SPIN hub in the middle of the wheel, the Spin the wheel button underneath it, or the space bar. The name that stops under the pointer is the one you drew.

Your list stays in the browser you typed it into, so the same names are waiting the next time you open the page on that device. Nothing is uploaded and no account exists to create.

Drawing With and Without Replacement

Statisticians call the difference between the two modes drawing with replacement and drawing without replacement, and it decides what your draw actually means. A real hat draws without replacement. A roulette wheel draws with replacement.

The distinction matters most when a prize is involved. If you draw three winners out of a hat and put each slip back, one person can win twice, and someone in the room will point that out. Leave the remove setting on and three spins give you three different people.

Hiding the Names for a Blind Draw

A wheel covered in names is not really a hat, because everyone can see the odds and watch their own segment come around. The Hide names on the wheel switch turns every segment into a question mark. The colors stay, the spin looks the same, and the name only appears in the result banner once the wheel stops.

Use it whenever the draw is being watched by the people in it. A blind draw removes the argument that the wheel was nudged, it stops the small groan that goes round the room when a segment gets close, and it makes the reveal the moment rather than the spin. Turn it back off when you want the audience to follow the pointer, which is usually more fun for a classroom or a stream.

What People Use a Name Hat For

The hat draw is the most general tool on this site, because the only thing it assumes is that you have a list and need one item off it.

Two of those rows deserve a note. A Secret Santa draw needs one extra rule that a hat cannot enforce: nobody should draw their own name. Remove the drawer from the wheel before their spin, then put the name back for the next person. For a giveaway, run the draw with the Results list visible and export it afterward, so you have a timestamped record of the order in which the names came out.

Paper Hat Compared With an Online Draw

Paper still wins in one situation, and it is worth naming rather than pretending otherwise.

That last row is the real trade. A physical hat is trusted because it is physical. If you are drawing in front of people, put the wheel on a projector or share your screen, use the Fullscreen button, and let them watch the spin. A draw people watched is a draw people accept.

Is the Draw Actually Random?

The wheel picks the winning segment with crypto.getRandomValues, the browser’s cryptographic random number generator, and it discards values that would fall outside a clean range rather than folding them back in. That second step is the part most spinners skip, and skipping it makes the first few entries in a list very slightly more likely to win. Here, every name has the same chance on every spin.

The animation is decoration. The result is chosen before the wheel starts turning, and the spin is then rendered to land on it, so the length of the spin, where you clicked and how long you held the button change nothing. How the draw is randomized explains the sequence in more detail, including why the tick sound is generated from the segment crossings rather than a recording.

Drawing Several Names at Once

There is no bulk draw button, and that is deliberate. Spinning once per winner keeps the draw watchable, and a giveaway that produces five winners in one silent click convinces nobody.

1. Switch on Remove entry after it is picked before the first spin.
2. Spin once per name you need. The wheel shrinks each time and the odds for the names left in the hat rise, exactly as slips of paper would.
3. Read the order off the Results list. First out is at the top, so the list is your running order or your first, second and third prize.
4. Export the CSV if the result matters to anyone but you. The file opens in Excel, Numbers or Sheets and carries the order the names came out.

If you need to draw the same list again from scratch, press Restore starting list. Every name goes back into the hat and the results clear.

Mistakes That Make a Draw Look Rigged

A fair draw and a draw that looks fair are two different things, and the second one takes a little care.

• Editing the list after the first spin. Add a late entrant before you start, or start over. Changing the hat mid-draw is the fastest way to lose the room.
• Drawing privately and announcing the winner. Nobody can check that. Record the screen or draw live, even if only three people are watching.
• Re-spinning because you did not like the result. If a re-spin is ever going to be allowed, say so before the draw, not after.
• Leaving duplicate names in the list. Two identical entries are two chances to win, which may be what you want for a weighted raffle and is otherwise a mistake nobody can see.
• Forgetting the remove setting. The single most common error. Check the switch before you spin, not after somebody wins twice.

Weighting a Name Hat

Some draws are meant to be unequal. A raffle where people bought different numbers of tickets is the clearest case, and a hat handles it naturally, because a person with five tickets has five slips in the bowl.

Do the same here: enter the name once per ticket. Five lines reading the same name give that person five of the segments and five times the chance. Turn Remove entry after it is picked off for a weighted single-winner draw, since removing one slip of five would change the odds mid-draw. For a weighted draw with several distinct winners, remove the person’s remaining lines by tapping their chips after they win.

Using the Name Hat in a Classroom

Teachers were pulling sticks out of a cup long before anything on this page existed, and the reason holds up: a random call spreads participation past the four hands that always go up. The hat draw works for that, and the classroom randomizer hub has seven more tools built around the same wheel.

Two of them are worth knowing about before you build a hat by hand. Draw one student’s name in class starts with a roster already loaded and is set up for cold calling, which means the remove setting is off by default so a student can be called twice in a lesson. Build a speaking running order starts with numbered slots and the remove setting on, which is what presentations need.

Whichever you use, keep student names to a first name and a last initial. The list never leaves the device, but a projector shows it to thirty people, and a shared cart laptop shows it to the next class as well.

Sharing a Draw With Other People

Copy share link writes your list into the URL itself. Send that link and the other person opens the same names on their own screen, with nothing stored on a server in between. It is the simplest way to hand a prepared hat to a colleague, or to keep one bookmarked list per group without retyping.

The link carries the names and not the results, so the person you send it to runs their own draw. If you need them to see your result rather than run their own, export the CSV and send that instead.

Other Ways to Split a List

A hat draw answers “which one”. Three related questions come up often enough to have their own wheels. Decide the opening turn is a hat draw narrowed to a single question, with ordinal positions on the wheel instead of names. Match people two by two handles the case where you need partners rather than one winner, and Split players into squads does the same for larger teams. If the question is not “who” at all but “should I”, settle a yes/no question is a two-segment wheel built for it.

All of them run on the same engine as this page, so the list editor, the remove setting, the results export and the share link behave identically. The full set of wheels is on the home page.