Random Letter Generator

The Random Letter Generator picks one to ten letters from the alphabet of the language you choose and shows each one on its own card in large type. Sixteen scripts are available, from the Latin A–Z used by English, French, German and Spanish to Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian and seven Indian scripts including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali. It is the tool behind a "pick a letter" game, a Scattergories round or an alphabet drill, and it works the same whether you want one letter or a handful.

Settings

• Number of letters: 1 to 10. Ask for more and you get an error rather than a result. Letters inside a single batch never repeat, so ten English letters means ten different ones.
• Language: Armenian, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and Telugu. English is selected by default.
• Characters to include (English only): Upper case, Lower case, or Upper & Lower, which draws from all 52 forms. The option disappears when you switch to another language; German, French and Spanish return capitals only.

What is in each alphabet

The lists are not all the same size, and a few are not strictly alphabets. Here is what each language draws from:

Chinese has no alphabet, so that list is a teaching set rather than a script; expect 三, 水 or ā rather than anything you could spell with. Japanese is listed twice in the dropdown, and at the moment the first entry returns nothing; pick the second Japanese entry if the first gives you an empty result.

Ways people use it

• Scattergories and "name something that starts with" games. One upper-case English letter per round, without a die that keeps landing on S.
• Alphabet practice for kids. Draw three lower-case letters and ask for the sound, the capital form and a word that starts with each.
• Learning a new script. Pull five Hindi, Russian or Greek letters and write or say each one before checking. The cards show the glyph only, so keep your chart nearby.
• Constrained writing prompts. Generate ten letters and use them as the starting letters of ten lines, or as the letters a poem's words must avoid.
• Splitting a group. Everyone whose surname begins with a drawn letter forms a team.

If a letter is not enough, the Random Word Generator gives you whole English words, the Random Noun Generator and Random Adjective Generator narrow that to one part of speech, and the Acronym Generator turns a set of letters into something pronounceable. Browse all word and language generators for more.