Letter Wheel

The letter wheel is a random letter generator in the shape of a wheel: the 26 letters of the English alphabet are already on it, so one spin gives you a letter for a word game, a classroom activity or anything else that starts with "think of something beginning with…".

What is on the wheel

The 26 letters of the modern English alphabet, A to Z, in alphabetical order. Each letter appears once, so each has exactly the same 1 in 26 chance — 3.85%. That is deliberate: the wheel picks letters, not letters as they occur in English text, where E turns up far more often than Z. If you want common letters to come up more, see the section on odds below.

Ways people use a letter wheel

• Category games: spin a letter, then everyone names a city, an animal, a food and a band starting with it before the timer runs out.
• Phonics and letter of the day: spin in class and ask for the sound and three words that start with it.
• Name brainstorming: spin for the first letter of a baby name, a pet name or a team name.
• Alphabet challenge: switch on "Remove the winner" and work through all 26 letters in a random order.
• Storytelling game: every sentence has to start with the letter the wheel lands on.

Removing hard letters or weighting the odds

Delete Q, X and Z for a fairer category game: with 23 letters left each one has a 4.35% chance. Keep only A, E, I, O and U for a vowel wheel at 20% each. There is no separate weights field — type a letter twice and it counts as two entries, and the result always reports the real figure after every spin. Lowercase letters work too; the wheel shows whatever you type.

Getting A to Z back

Edits are saved in this browser for this page only, so the letter wheel and the plain wheel keep separate lists. "Restore all" puts back the letters that "Remove the winner" took off, and "Restore the preset" replaces any edits with the full alphabet. Nothing is uploaded: a shared link carries the entries inside the link itself.