Sometimes you need a word you would not have thought of yourself. A writing prompt to break a blank page. A first word for a game of Taboo or charades. Placeholder names for a project, a server or a pet. Starter words for a brainstorm, where a random nudge can unstick an idea. A random word generator gives you those without the bias of your own habits.
Choose how many words you want and press Generate again whenever you want a fresh set.
What the words are
The tool draws from a hand-picked list of about 180 common English words: mostly concrete nouns and a few adjectives, such as amber, anchor, canyon, lantern, orchid, saddle, thunder and willow. They are all easy to spell and to say, and none is rude, obscure or tied to a brand. That is a deliberate choice. A list taken straight from a dictionary would be full of words that nobody uses, and a lot of the fun of random words is that they are recognisable.
The drawback of a short list is that you will see repeats and familiar words sooner than you would with a big dictionary. With 180 words there is a modest number of combinations, and the tool picks each word independently, so the same word can occur twice in one batch.
Settings
How many words goes up to 1,000. Separate with lets you choose new lines, commas or spaces, so you can paste a list of ideas, a comma-separated set into a spreadsheet, or a sentence-like string of words. Shortest and Longest word narrow the length, between 3 and 12 letters, which helps for word games that need five-letter words or for something short enough to be a username. Capitalize gives each word an initial capital, handy for headings or names built from two or three words, like “Amber Harbor”.
The words are picked with your browser’s secure random number generator, so there is no pattern or seed behind them.
What it is not for
Not for passwords. A password made from words picked from a list this size is much weaker than people expect: each word contributes only about 7.5 bits of randomness, so even five words give about 37 bits, which can be cracked rapidly. Serious passphrase schemes use lists of thousands of words, and then add enough of them to reach 70 bits or more. For a password, use the random password generator.
Not for statistics either. The list has been chosen for usefulness, not to match how frequent words really are in English.
Ideas for use
Name a side project with two random words. Seed a writing exercise by drawing three words and writing a paragraph that uses them. Practise spelling or vocabulary with children by asking them to define each word. Use words as temporary labels for test data; the random name generator does the same for people’s names. And for a letter at a time rather than whole words, try the random letter generator.