How the spinning wheel works
Type or paste your options into the Entries box, one per line, and each line becomes a slice of the wheel. Press Spin, click the wheel, or tap Space or Enter, and the wheel winds up, slows down naturally and stops with the pointer on the winner. A pop-up shows the result, a screen reader announcement reads it out, and it is added to Recent winners so you can see the last ten spins.
Want someone to have a better chance? Write Alice*3 and Alice gets three times the space on the wheel and three times the odds. Shuffle, sort A–Z and clear the list in one click, and every change can be undone.
Is it fair?
Many wheel spinners pick a random spin speed and see where the wheel happens to stop, which mixes physics with rounding errors. This wheel works the other way round: the winner is chosen first with crypto.getRandomValues(), the same cryptographically secure source browsers use for passwords and keys, with rejection sampling so there is no modulo bias. The animation is then calculated to land on that exact slice, never near an edge, so the result you see is always the result that was drawn. Every entry with the same weight has exactly the same chance on every spin, and past results never affect the next one.
Ideas for using a wheel of names
- Classroom: cold-call students without favorites, pick a reading order, or choose the next spelling letter. Turn on Remove winner after spin so everyone gets a turn before anyone goes twice, and go fullscreen on the projector.
- Giveaways and raffles: paste the entrants’ names, give extra entries a weight, and spin live on a stream so the audience sees the draw happen.
- Decisions: where to eat, which film to watch, who does the dishes, or a quick yes or no. The wheel takes the argument out of small choices.
- Teams and games: pick team captains, the first player, a forfeit or a random category for a quiz round.