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.
Compare the number of winners to the number of ways the whole assemblage could be randomly jumbled.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 15, 2026
Participants with degenerative meniscal tears were randomly assigned to receive either partial meniscectomy or sham surgery, and their progress was tracked for 10 years.
From Science Daily • May 6, 2026
Serna also criticized the deputy’s actions during the encounter, saying, “They randomly go into someone’s house and do whatever they want.”
From Los Angeles Times • May 6, 2026
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has had to instruct some of its AI tools to stop talking about "goblins", after finding the term had randomly crept into responses.
From BBC • Apr. 30, 2026
"If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion."
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
