List Shuffler

How a fair shuffle works

The shuffle walks from the last item to the first and swaps each one with an item chosen at random from those not yet placed, the method known as Fisher–Yates. Every possible order is equally likely. Home-made shortcuts, such as sorting by a random key in a spreadsheet with ties or swapping random pairs a fixed number of times, can favour some orders. With 10 items there are 3,628,800 orders and with 20 about 2.4 billion billion, so the same order practically never repeats.

Teams, order, and samples

To split people into teams, shuffle the names and count them off in turn: first to team one, second to team two, and so on, which keeps team sizes within one of each other. For speaking or presentation order, the shuffled list is the order. Taking the first five lines of a shuffled list is a fair random sample of five with no repeats, useful for spot checks and prize draws.

How to use it

1. Choose the options or enter one item per line.
2. Generate a fresh result locally.
3. Copy the result when you are ready.

Privacy & limitations

Inputs and results stay in your browser. This tool does not send list contents or generated values to a server.