Random Letter Generator

The three distributions

• Even — every letter equally likely. Correct for a category game where you want Q and Z to come up as often as E, and wrong for anything meant to look like a real rack.
• English frequency — weighted by how often each letter appears in written English. Draws look like plausible fragments of text.
• Tile bag — a standard hundred-tile English set, drawn without replacement. This is the realistic one: the bag has exactly one Q, one Z and twelve Es, so a draw feels like the game.

Practising with racks

Draw seven from the tile bag, guarantee two vowels, and give yourself a minute to find the longest word you can. Then paste the same letters into the Word Finder and see what you missed. Doing that a dozen times teaches more about rack-reading than any amount of word memorisation, because the skill being trained is pattern recognition rather than recall.

Other uses

• Category games, where a letter is drawn and everyone names something beginning with it.
• Handwriting and letter-recognition practice with young children.
• Randomising an order — draw twenty-six for a full alphabet shuffle.