Random Letter Wheel
A random letter from A to Z, drawn in front of everyone.
What's on this wheel
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
How to use it
Word games live or die on the starting letter. Scattergories, categories, and most classroom vocabulary games all need one, and drawing it visibly stops any suspicion that the letter was chosen to suit somebody.
If you are playing a category game, turn on "Remove each winner after spinning" so the same letter cannot come up twice across rounds. Twenty-six rounds is more than most games need, but it keeps every round genuinely fresh.
Some letters make for miserable rounds. If your group wants to skip them, delete Q, X and Z from the list. The wheel adjusts to whatever letters you leave in.
Getting the letters right for your game
A plain A–Z wheel gives Q, X and Z exactly the same odds as S, T and P, and no word game actually wants that. Scattergories worked this out decades ago: its die has twenty faces, not twenty-six, and leaves out Q, U, V, X, Y and Z entirely. The game was designed around dropping them. If you are playing anything Scattergories-shaped, delete those six before you start and every round gets better immediately.
For a classroom the opposite is true, and it is the reason not to bake the exclusions into this page. A phonics or vocabulary exercise that never lands on X is not covering the alphabet: the awkward letters are the whole point of the exercise. Leave all twenty-six in and turn on "Remove each winner after spinning", and the wheel doubles as a register of which letters the class has already worked through.
One house rule worth adopting for category games: agree before you start that the group gets exactly one re-spin, no justification required. A round where nobody can think of a single answer is not a difficult round, it is dead air. The argument about whether this one counts as unplayable reliably takes longer than the re-spin would have. Deciding in advance that you get one costs nothing and heads off the argument entirely.
Common questions
- Can I remove the difficult letters?
- Yes, delete any letters you do not want from the list on the right. Q, X and Z are the usual candidates.
- Can I include numbers too?
- Add them as extra lines. The wheel treats every line as an option, so letters and numbers can share a wheel.
- Is it suitable for a classroom?
- Yes. There is no signup, no ads inside the wheel itself, and it works on a projector or an interactive whiteboard.