List Randomizer: Shuffle Any List Into Random Order

Paste your list with one item per line and press Shuffle. Every item is kept and only the order changes, and the seed shown lets you bring the same order back.

Runs in your browserFree, no sign-upLast reviewed October 13, 2026

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Quick answers

How do I randomize a list?: Paste the list with one item per line and press Shuffle. Each item appears once in a new random position. An 8-item list has 40,320 possible orders, and pressing Shuffle again picks another one.
How do I shuffle a list of names fairly?: Put each name on its own line and press Shuffle. The Fisher-Yates method used here gives every name the same chance of landing in every position: with 8 names, each has a 1 in 8 chance of coming first. Where a name sits in your list does not matter.
Can I get the same random order again?: Yes. Note the Seed used figure in the Shuffle panel, keep the list unchanged and type that number into Seed (optional). The same list with the same seed always produces the same order, on any device.
How do I pick 3 random items from a list?: Enter 3 in Keep only the first and press Shuffle. The whole list is shuffled and the top 3 are kept, in the order drawn. No item can appear twice unless it is on two lines of your list.
How many ways can a list be ordered?: A list of n different items has n factorial orders: n times every whole number below it. That is 6 for 3 items, 120 for 5, 40,320 for 8 and 3,628,800 for 10. The tool shows this figure as Possible orders.
Is the shuffle truly random?: It is pseudo-random. A seed number drives the shuffle, so the same seed and list always give the same order, and each press of Shuffle uses a new seed. It is even-handed for everyday use but is not cryptographically secure or a certified draw.

Why use List Randomizer

This list randomizer puts the lines of a list into a random order. Paste names, tasks, questions, songs or anything else with one item per line and press Shuffle: every item comes back exactly once in a new position. You can number the result, remove duplicate lines before shuffling, or keep only the first few items after the shuffle. The order is produced by a Fisher-Yates shuffle, the standard method that gives no position an advantage, driven by a seeded pseudo-random generator. Each result shows the seed it used, so typing that seed back in with the same list reproduces the order exactly. That makes a shuffle checkable by someone else, and it also means the tool is not cryptographically secure.

Example shuffles you can reproduce

Real results from the tool. Each one used the number given in Seed (optional), so entering the same list and seed gives you the same order. With the seed left blank, every press gives a different order.

Eight names in random order

List: Alice, Ben, Chidi, Dana, Eli, Fatima, Gus, Hana (one per line). Seed 100.

Hana, Alice, Fatima, Gus, Eli, Dana, Chidi, Ben

Shuffle panel: Possible orders 40,320, Items that changed place 7 of 8. Eli stayed fifth, which is normal: see the question on items staying put below.

The same names with a different seed

The same eight names. Seed 2026.

Gus, Ben, Eli, Alice, Fatima, Hana, Chidi, Dana

Numbered, and cut to the first three

The same eight names. Number the shuffled list ticked. Keep only the first 3. Seed 100.

1. Hana, 2. Alice, 3. Fatima

These are the first three of the full seed 100 shuffle above, so cutting the list never changes who comes first.

A numbered order for dinner choices

List: Pizza, Tacos, Sushi, Burgers, Curry. Number the shuffled list ticked. Seed 7.

1. Burgers, 2. Tacos, 3. Sushi, 4. Curry, 5. Pizza

Randomizing the order of ten quiz questions

List: Question 1 to Question 10, one per line. Seed 42.

Questions 1, 8, 4, 6, 3, 2, 9, 10, 5, 7

Possible orders 3,628,800. Use a different seed for each version of the paper and keep the seeds so you can rebuild the answer keys.

Removing duplicates before shuffling

List: Sam, Jo, Sam, Lee, Jo, Kim. Remove duplicate lines first ticked. Seed 5.

Jo, Sam, Kim, Lee

Duplicates removed 2, Items in the list 4.

Number of possible orders by list length

The figure the tool reports as Possible orders, for lists of different items.

Items in the list	Possible orders	Chance of any one order
2	2	1 in 2
3	6	1 in 6
4	24	1 in 24
5	120	1 in 120
6	720	1 in 720
8	40,320	1 in 40,320
10	3,628,800	1 in 3,628,800
18	6,402,373,705,728,000	1 in about 6.4 quadrillion
20	about 2.43 × 10^18	Effectively zero
52	about 8.07 × 10^67	Effectively zero
100	about 9.33 × 10^157	Effectively zero

Up to 18 items the count is shown exactly; longer lists are shown in scientific notation. If the list contains repeated lines, some of these orders look identical.

How the Fisher-Yates shuffle works

This is the standard way to shuffle in software. For a list of n items:

Start at the last position, n.
Pick a random position from 1 up to and including the current position.
Swap the items in those two positions. An item may be swapped with itself.
Move one position towards the start and repeat until you reach the first position.
The list is now in a random order. Every item has been placed exactly once and none is lost or repeated.

Seeds, repeatable shuffles and how random this is

The random positions come from a small pseudo-random generator (mulberry32) that is started from a seed, a whole number. The seed fixes everything that follows, so one list and one seed always give one order.

With Seed (optional) left blank, the page picks a fresh seed from about a million possibilities each time you press Shuffle and shows it as Seed used. To let someone else check a result, give them the list and that figure: entering both reproduces the order. You can also choose your own seed before shuffling, any whole number from 1 to 4,294,967,295, for example a date agreed in advance.

Two honest limits follow from this. First, the output is predictable to anyone who knows the seed, so it is not suitable where the order must be secret or where a regulated or audited draw is required. Second, there are more ways to order a long list than there are seeds. A 10-item list has 3,628,800 orders, more than the roughly one million seeds the button can choose, and a 13-item list has 6,227,020,800, more than every seed you could type. So for longer lists not every conceivable order can turn up. Each item's chance of landing in any given position stays even: in a test of the 8-name sample across seeds 1 to 80,000, every name came first between 9,844 and 10,118 times against an expected 10,000.

What people shuffle

Names, for a speaking order, presentation order, seating plan or who goes first.
Quiz and exam questions, so each version of a paper has a different order.
Chores, tasks or rota slots, to share out the unpopular ones without argument.
A reading list, playlist or film list when you cannot decide where to start.
Survey or interview questions, to reduce the effect of question order on answers.
Sample rows of test data, where the order should not depend on how the data was entered.

What it does not do

Items are split at line breaks only. A row of comma-separated names counts as one item, so put each on its own line first.
Blank lines are dropped and spaces at the start and end of each line are trimmed.
Duplicate removal compares lines exactly: Sam and sam are treated as different items.
It does not divide a list into groups. Use the Random Team Generator for that.
It does not draw with repeats or run a raffle with a set number of winners. The Random Choice Picker is built for that.
The limit is 10,000 items, and lists are not saved when you leave the page.

How to use it

1
Replace the sample names in List items (one per line) with your own list, one item on each line.
2
Tick Number the shuffled list if you want 1., 2., 3. in front of the results.
3
Tick Remove duplicate lines first if every item should appear only once.
4
Optionally enter a number in Keep only the first to cut the shuffled list down to that many items.
5
Press Shuffle. Press it again for a new order, or type an earlier Seed used figure into Seed (optional) to get that order back.

Questions people ask

Why did one item stay in the same position?

Because staying put is one of the possible outcomes. In a fair shuffle each item has a 1 in n chance of landing where it started, and on average one item per shuffle does, whatever the length of the list. About 37% of shuffles of a long list move every item. The Items that changed place figure shows what happened.

What is the difference between this and the Random Choice Picker?

This tool reorders a whole list and returns every item. The Random Choice Picker draws a set number of winners and can allow the same entry to win more than once. Keeping only the first few items here gives a similar result to a no-repeat draw.

Does the order of my original list affect the result?

It does not make any item more or less likely to land in a given place. It does matter for reproducing a shuffle: the same seed gives the same order only if the list is entered in the same original order with the same items.

What happens to duplicate lines?

By default they are kept, and each line is shuffled as a separate item. Tick Remove duplicate lines first to keep only the first copy of each; the Shuffle panel then reports how many were removed.

Can I shuffle a comma-separated list?

Not directly. The tool reads one item per line, which lets an item contain commas, such as Smith, John. Replace the commas with line breaks first, for example with a find and replace tool, then paste the result.

Can I use it to draw competition winners?

For classroom, office and casual social draws, yes: shuffle the entrants and take the top names, and publish the seed so others can check. It is not cryptographically secure or independently certified, so do not use it where rules or law require an audited draw.

How many items can I shuffle?

Up to 10,000 lines. The shuffled list, the numbering and the table showing each item's original position are all produced for the full list.

Is my list uploaded anywhere?

No. The shuffle runs in your browser and the list is not sent to a server or stored. Follow your own organization's rules before pasting personal data anywhere.