Random Word Generator

How to use the random word generator

1. How many words — from 1 to 100. One word is right for a drawing or acting round; a longer list suits brainstorming or a word bank.
2. Word type — any word, or only nouns, verbs or adjectives. Things to draw keeps nouns for objects, animals, plants, food and body parts: words you can sketch, like cat, bicycle, guitar.
3. How common — “Most common” keeps the 2,504 words everyone knows, “Common” (the default) adds the next 3,269, and “Less common too” goes up to 11,468 words, still real everyday vocabulary rather than dictionary curiosities.
4. Syllables, first and last letters, length — optional filters. “Starts with b” and 1 syllable gives short words for young readers; “ends with ing” or exactly 5 letters gives words for a puzzle or a rhyme.

Press Generate words for a fresh set; every press draws again. The words appear in a line you can copy with one tap, and the table below them shows each word’s type, syllables and number of letters. The first draw downloads the word list once (about 42 KB); after that everything runs in your browser and nothing you choose is sent anywhere.

Where the words come from

A random word is only useful if people know it. That’s why this generator doesn’t pick from a full dictionary, where most entries are rare (a typical Scrabble word list has over 170,000 words). It combines three openly licensed sources:

• Which words, and how common: the 12dicts “2+2+3frq” list by Alan Beale (version 6.0.2), which groups English headwords into frequency classes using a corpus-based frequency list from Brigham Young University. We use the 15 most frequent of its 21 classes, base forms only (run, not running or ran), lowercase words only — no names, abbreviations or hyphenated words. Its author released 12dicts into the public domain.
• Part of speech: WordNet 3.0 from Princeton University. Many English words are both a noun and a verb, so a word counts as a noun, verb or adjective only when that use makes up at least a quarter of its occurrences in WordNet’s hand-tagged sample texts. Light is therefore listed as a noun and an adjective, while dog appears only as a noun. “Things to draw” are nouns whose main meaning WordNet files under objects, animals, plants, food or the body. WordNet’s licence allows free use with its copyright notice.
• Syllables: the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University), which counts the vowel sounds in American pronunciation; it is published under a BSD licence.

Slurs, swear words, sexual terms, drug names, weapons and graphic-violence words were removed with a block list, so the generator is safe to project in a classroom. Ordinary words with a serious meaning, such as war or illness, stay in the list.

How many words each setting draws from:

A word that is, for example, both a noun and a verb is counted in both rows, so the type rows add up to more than the total.

How the words are drawn

All words that pass your filters go into one pool, and each has exactly the same chance. The page uses your browser’s cryptographically secure generator (crypto.getRandomValues) with rejection sampling, so no word is favored by rounding, and shuffles only as far as it needs (a partial Fisher–Yates shuffle), so a single draw never repeats a word. With the default settings (10 words from the 5,773 common words) there are more than 10³¹ possible sets, so the next press practically never brings back the same one. If fewer words fit your filters than you asked for, you get all of them in random order and the result says so.

Ideas and worked examples

Pictionary and drawing games

Set Things to draw and Most common: the pool has 324 familiar nouns such as house, tree, apple, chair, fish. For young children, add 1 syllable — 202 words like cat, dog, egg, hat. For adults or teens who want harder rounds, choose Common (891 words, including elephant, banana, pizza). Generate one word per turn, or 20 at once and cut them into slips for a bowl.

Charades

Verbs make good acting prompts. Verbs with Most common gives 869 words such as swim, dance, laugh, climb, sleep, throw. Some verbs are abstract, so let the actor skip a word they can’t show — the next press gives another.

Writing prompts

Draw one adjective, one noun and one verb — three presses with the word type changed in between — and build a scene from them. Common words give 1,150 adjectives, 3,718 nouns and 1,740 verbs, so the combinations practically never repeat: an ancient bridge and whisper can become the first line of a story. Ten random nouns in a row also work as a warm-up: write one sentence that uses all of them.

Brainstorming

Random words break fixed thinking. Draw 5 nouns and ask how each could relate to your product name, slogan, story plot or problem; the odd connections are the point. To keep a theme, filter by first letter — Nouns, starts with b, 1 syllable, Most common leaves 51 words, handy for alliterative names.

Vocabulary and spelling practice

Teachers can set word lengths for spelling lists: exactly 5 letters among the most common words gives 445 words. For older students, Adjectives, 4 or more syllables and Less common too gives 702 words such as magnificent, unexpected, mysterious: ask students to define each word or use it in a sentence. Words ending in ing (117 among the common words) suit a lesson on suffixes.

Limits

• Words come in their base form only, with American spelling (color, not colour).
• A word’s part of speech follows its most frequent uses: bridge counts as a noun and a verb, fast only as an adjective, although “to fast” is also a verb.
• Syllables follow American pronunciation in the CMU dictionary, so a few words count differently from how some people say them: fire and hour have 2 syllables there.
• Commonness is measured in written and spoken American English as a whole, not for a particular age; check a list before using it with small children.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated: October 15, 2026