Random Number Generator | Random Subset | Random Time of Day | Random Number x Digits | Sorting

Random Sorting

This page can randomly reorder a list or text. The input can consist of numbers, letters, or any characters separated by spaces or line breaks. Please enter the list or text in the upper of the two input fields and select whether the items should be separated by spaces or line breaks. The randomly reordered list will be displayed in the lower field and can be copied and further used. It will also be shown how many elements (or words) the list consists of; this number is the same for both the source text and the resulting text.

A simple example: the input consists of the text "One Two Three Four Five". Clicking Random sort will rearrange these five words in a random order. The output might be, for example, "Four Three One Five Two". Here, you can immediately see that the text consists of five elements, but with longer inputs that don't consist of consecutive numbers, you won't.
By the way, the number of different ways to rearrange an input of n elements is n!, pronounced n factorial. For 5 elements, this is 5*4*3*2*1, which is 120. With many elements, this value becomes very large. This calculation applies when all elements are different. If the elements are the same, there are fewer possibilities, but the calculation is more complicated.

An example for the use of a random list of words: At school, the spelling of certain words is to be practiced. These are either dictated or can simply be copied. To remember the correct spelling of the words regardless of their original order, it can be useful to change the order of these words with each practice session. This can be easily done here.

By the way, if you take a sentence and shuffle the order of the words, you can often still guess the original meaning from the resulting jumble of words. This is all the easier, of course, the shorter the sentence is. As an example, you can play around with the first sentence on this page.