A random letter is a small thing that turns up in a lot of games and lessons. Pick a letter to start a round of “name a country beginning with…”. Draw seven tiles for a word game when you do not have the bag. Choose a letter for a classroom activity. Make a string of characters to test a text field, a sorting routine or a layout.
Choose how many characters you want and what to pick them from, and the result appears straight away. Press Generate again for a new set.
The character sets
Lowercase or uppercase letters from a to z. Upper and lowercase mixes both. Digits is 0 to 9. Letters and digits combines all of them, useful for making identifiers and test codes. Vowels only picks from a, e, i, o and u. Consonants only picks from the other 21 letters.
For the single random letter of the alphabet that most games call for, set the count to 1.
Separators
By default the characters run together as one string, which is what you want for a code or a test value. Choose spaces to get letters you can read one at a time, commas to paste into a list, or new lines for one per line.
How random is it
Each character comes from your browser’s secure random number generator, and every character in the chosen set is equally likely. That has one consequence for word games that is worth knowing. Real games weight their letters, because a bag of tiles has many more E’s than Z’s. A fair draw from the whole alphabet gives you as many Q’s and X’s as E’s, so a hand of seven letters often has no vowels at all. If that makes a game unplayable, draw from vowels and consonants separately: say, three vowels and four consonants.
Handy ideas
Classroom: call out a random letter and have students write a word, a name or a place starting with it; the vowels-only option works for phonics. Games: choose a starting letter for “Scattergories” style rounds or an alphabet challenge. Testing: generate a long uppercase string to see how a field handles it, or digits for a numeric input.
This is not a password generator, even though it can make a mixed string, because it does not guarantee a mix of types and does not shuffle in symbols. For a password use the random password generator. For whole words see the random word generator, and to test whether a draw of letters can be rearranged into a word, the anagram checker checks a guess against them.