Random word generator
Words for charades, spelling practice, writing prompts or whatever else needs an arbitrary starting point. Everything here is filtered to vocabulary people actually recognise, so you will not be handed QINDARKA and asked to act it out.
An unfiltered dictionary is useless here
There are 171,280 words in the full list and the overwhelming majority of them are inflections, technical terms and words that have not been in general use for a century. Pull at random from that and you get ABAMPERES and ZOOTOXINS, which is entertaining once and unusable for anything.
So this draws from the 25,298-word common subset instead. It is still large enough that you will not see repeats, and small enough that every word it returns is one you could reasonably ask a child to spell or a friend to mime.
Click any generated word to read its definition and see what it scores in both games.
Good length ranges
- 4 to 6 for charades and Pictionary. Concrete, easy to act, easy to draw.
- 5 to 7 for spelling practice at primary level.
- 7 to 10 for harder vocabulary work and writing prompts.
- 3 to 5 for a warm-up round or for younger children.
Turn it into a worksheet
Generate a batch, copy them, and paste them into the word scramble maker. That gives you shuffled versions of each with a choice of difficulty, which is a printable exercise in about thirty seconds.
Other generators and tools
Word scramble maker
The natural next step. Paste a word list and get several shuffled versions of each, so you can pick the difficulty rather than accepting whatever the first shuffle gave you.
Check a word
Is it valid, what does it mean, and what does it score in each game.
Syllable counter
For poetry, and for spelling lists graded by difficulty.
Browse word lists
By length, starting letter, ending or prefix, if random is not what you want.
About the generator
Where do the words come from?
The same list the solvers use, filtered to the 25,298 words common enough that most people would recognise them. That filter matters: an unfiltered dictionary would hand you words like QINDARKA and ZYZZYVA, which are useless for a party game or a writing prompt.
Are they really random?
Random within whatever length range you set, and drawn without replacement so the same word cannot appear twice in one batch. The selection happens on your device, so nobody else is getting the same set at the same moment.
What is this actually useful for?
Charades and Pictionary are the obvious ones, and the four to six letter range gives you words that are easy to draw or act. Beyond that: writing prompts, spelling practice, naming test data, password passphrases, and warm-up exercises where you have to connect three unrelated words into a sentence.
Teachers use it for spelling lists, which is why the length controls are the first thing on the form.
Can I get longer or harder words?
Set the shortest to eight or nine letters and you will get noticeably harder vocabulary, since long common words are less common than short ones. For genuinely obscure words the generator is the wrong tool; browse the word lists by length instead.
Can I turn these into a puzzle?
Yes, and that is usually the point. Generate a set, then paste it into the scramble maker and you have a worksheet in two steps.