Random word generator.
One word, any level.

A “what word can I make with these letters” generator is an anagram or word-unscrambler tool: you type in a set of letters and it lists every valid word those letters can spell — handy for Scrabble, Words With Friends, and word puzzles. Our tool works the other way around: it is a random word generator that hands you a brand-new random word in one click, complete with its part of speech and definition. Use it to discover words, build vocabulary, or spark ideas, then reach for a dedicated unscrambler when you need to solve a specific rack of letters.

Here are 20 random words to get you started: apple, mountain, whisper, rocket, velvet, puzzle, garden, thunder, lantern, orbit, marble, canyon, feather, engine, harbor, meadow, crystal, jungle, compass, and ribbon. Every time you press Generate, this random word generator pulls a fresh word at random, so you can build your own list of 20 (or 50) in seconds and copy the ones you like.

Common synonyms for “random” include arbitrary, haphazard, chance, accidental, unplanned, aimless, indiscriminate, unpredictable, casual, and stray. In everyday speech people also say “pick one at random,” “a random choice,” or “out of the blue.” Our generator is random in the truest sense — each word is chosen by chance, so the results are unbiased and genuinely unpredictable.

“Serendipity” is a favourite cool random word — it means a happy accident or pleasant surprise. Other cool, fun-to-say words include petrichor (the smell of rain on dry earth), ephemeral, luminous, quixotic, and mellifluous. Set the difficulty to hard and press Generate to keep discovering cool, unusual words like these.

There is no single “most unusual” word, but strong contenders include sesquipedalian (a long word, fittingly), floccinaucinihilipilification (judging something to be worthless), triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), and borborygmus (the rumbling of your stomach). Switch to the hard difficulty to surface rare and unusual words you may never have seen before.

Linguists studying “ultraconserved words” have identified around two dozen words thought to date back roughly 15,000 years, shared across ancient language families. The list includes: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, and worm. These everyday words changed very slowly over thousands of years, which is why they appear to share common roots.

Ten unfamiliar words worth learning: defenestration (throwing someone out of a window), sonder (the awareness that everyone has a life as vivid as your own), limerence (infatuation), apricity (the warmth of the sun in winter), susurrus (a whispering sound), ineffable (too great to put into words), clinquant (glittering), nudiustertian (relating to the day before yesterday), ultracrepidarian (someone who gives opinions beyond their knowledge), and gobbledygook (nonsense language). Use the hard setting to meet more words like these.

Commonly confused words include: affect/effect, their/there/they’re, your/you’re, its/it’s, then/than, to/too/two, accept/except, lose/loose, principal/principle, complement/compliment, stationary/stationery, who’s/whose, weather/whether, farther/further, fewer/less, lay/lie, bring/take, i.e./e.g., desert/dessert, elicit/illicit, ensure/insure, capital/capitol, breath/breathe, advice/advise, and cite/site/sight. A random word generator that shows definitions is a great way to practise these so you use each one correctly.

Among the oldest words still used in English are simple, high-frequency words like I, we, who, two, and thou, which researchers trace back thousands of years to ancient Proto-Indo-European roots. Because they are used so often, these words changed very little over time, making them some of the most enduring words in the language.