randomly
Americanadverb
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without definite aim, reason, sense, or pattern.
This poem just seems like a bunch of words randomly put together.
Freckles generally appear randomly on the face and upper shoulders.
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Statistics. in a way that gives each item in a set the equal probability of being chosen.
A survey of 309 women aged 15 to 49 was conducted in nine randomly selected villages.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of randomly
Explanation
Anything done randomly has no plan or strategy. If you choose your college courses randomly, you may end up studying some unusual topics. Hope you enjoy Advanced History of Cheese-Making! When you pick the name of a prize winner from, you're choosing randomly. In other words, there's no specific method to making the selection; you're simply grabbing a random slip of paper. Sometimes this adverb implies chaos: "Clothes were tossed randomly around her room, while a laundry basket stood empty." This haphazard sense of both randomly and random grew from the original definition, "at great speed."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Instacart said the shoppers were assigned to pricing experiments randomly, not sorted by income, demographics or browsing history.
From Salon ● Nov. 2, 2026
The door hasn’t spontaneously opened again—though some people have complained on Reddit about the same model opening randomly.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 31, 2026
Like the time he randomly and falsely accused a complete stranger on the other side of the world of being a child molester, simply because the man had disagreed with him?
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 20, 2026
Yet the fractional Fermi sea is not simply a collection of excited particles behaving randomly.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 18, 2026
The case was airtight, strong enough to withstand a blast of dynamite, and could be opened only with a randomly changing fifteen-digit computer-generated code.
From "City Spies" by James Ponti
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
