Shuffle lines into a truly random order with Fisher-Yates — or draw the first N as winners.
Whenever you need an order nobody can argue with — who presents first, which songs play in what sequence, who wins the giveaway — you need a genuinely random shuffle. This tool takes any list, one item per line, and rearranges it so that every possible ordering has exactly the same probability. Empty lines are ignored, so a list copied from a spreadsheet works as-is.
The shuffle uses the Fisher-Yates algorithm, the standard method computer scientists use precisely because naive approaches fail: sorting by a random key, for example, is measurably biased toward certain orderings. Fisher-Yates walks the list from the end, swapping each item with a uniformly chosen earlier position, which provably produces an unbiased permutation. For the randomness itself the tool uses the browser's cryptographic generator (crypto.getRandomValues) with rejection sampling to avoid modulo bias — the same quality of randomness used for generating passwords, far better than plain Math.random.
Two options cover the most common variations. "Pick only the first N" turns the shuffler into a raffle: shuffle everything, keep the top N — a fair draw of winners with no repeats, and the status line records how many were picked out of how many entries. "Shuffle words instead of lines" splits the text on spaces rather than line breaks, useful for randomizing word order in a single line — quiz answers, word games, brainstorming prompts. Everything runs 100% in your browser; your list is never uploaded anywhere.
Yes. It uses the Fisher-Yates algorithm driven by the browser's cryptographic random generator, so every possible ordering is equally likely — there is no bias toward the original order or any position.
Yes. Paste one entry per line, set "Pick only the first N" to the number of winners and click Shuffle: the tool draws N distinct entries at random. For public draws, consider screen-recording the moment for transparency.
No. Every non-empty line is kept, so a name entered three times has three chances in a draw. If you want each item to appear once, deduplicate the list first.
It splits the whole input on spaces instead of line breaks and shuffles the words, returning them as a single line — handy for word games and randomizing answer options.
No. The shuffle runs 100% in JavaScript on your device. Names and entries are never transmitted or stored, which makes it safe for participant lists.
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Vai.la is not responsible for how the tools are used or for decisions made based on their results.