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.
The animals were randomly divided into four groups.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 22, 2026
The words are randomly chosen at the last minute for Moynihan to insert within the prepared scripts, one of the people said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 17, 2026
The plaintiffs argue the winners were not selected randomly, as Musk had suggested, but chosen because they could serve as effective spokespeople for the group.
From Barron's ● Jul. 30, 2026
He also suggests multiple equivalent question papers allocated randomly, or localised papers, so that a breach in one location does not compromise an entire national examination.
From BBC ● Jul. 29, 2026
Criteria like this can be used to determine how likely it is that sequences of heads and tails or Xs and Os or hits and misses are randomly generated.
From "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" by John Allen Paulos
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.
