Letter picker wheel

A to Z, and the useful subsets

The wheel opens on all twenty-six. One click narrows it to the five vowels, or the twenty-one consonants, or an alphabet you type yourself — which is how you get a different script, a subset for a spelling game, or the eight letters a class is working on this week.

Custom letters are separated by spaces or commas, so A E I O U and A, E, I, O, U both work, and so does anything that is not a Latin letter at all.

What it gets used for

Letter wheels are mostly a teaching tool. A letter comes up and the class names something starting with it; a letter comes up and you write it; a letter comes up and it decides which group answers.

They are also how a lot of games start — categories, name-the-thing, word games that need a starting letter nobody chose on purpose. In both cases the value is that the letter is visibly not chosen by the person running the game, which is exactly what a wheel is for.

Twenty-six sectors is the interesting problem

The alphabet is why this wheel can draw thirty sectors at all.

A wheel with twenty-six slices gives each label a slice about fourteen degrees wide. At the inner end of that slice, where labels sit closest to their neighbours, there is very little room — and the rule this site holds itself to is that sector text stays at or above 3.5% of the wheel's diameter. Below that it is decoration rather than information.

Single letters are the easiest possible case for that rule, which is why twenty-six fits comfortably while twenty-six long names would not. Type a custom alphabet of words rather than letters and you can watch the constraint work: each label shrinks to fit its own slice, stops at the readable floor, and shortens rather than shrinking further. A label that has to be squinted at has failed at the only job it has.

Repeats

Letters come back after each spin by default, which is right for a game where the same letter can legitimately come up twice.

If you are working through the alphabet rather than sampling it, the remove-and-continue mode on the name picker does the same job for letters — paste the alphabet there instead. It is kept on that page rather than duplicated here because a control that appears on every page is not the reason any page exists.