Country Wheel
Pick a country for a geography prompt, a class activity or your next reading topic. This country wheel holds the 193 United Nations member states at equal weight, draws one name per press, and lists every entry so you can check the pool before you spin.
Why this country list?
Maps, indexes and classrooms count the world differently, so a spinner needs one fixed set. This wheel commits to the 193 member states of the United Nations. That excludes the two observer missions, the Holy See and the State of Palestine, and it excludes dependent territories such as Greenland, Bermuda or Puerto Rico. Names are the short English forms rather than the long official ones: Czechia appears on its own, and Ivory Coast, Türkiye, DR Congo and São Tomé and Príncipe are spelled the way the source dataset stores them, accents included. The panel under the button lists all 193 entries in alphabetical order, so you can read the whole pool before you draw from it.
How the pick is made
Every entry carries weight 1, so the picker treats the 193 names as one flat pool and each spin gives any country a 1/193 chance, about 0.52 percent. The page script asks the browser crypto layer for random bytes, then uses rejection sampling so no position in the list is favoured. One byte is enough for 193 entries because a byte holds 256 values. Values 0 through 192 are kept and matched to a position; the remaining 63 are discarded and another byte is drawn, so roughly a quarter of bytes are redrawn and a spin reads about 1.3 bytes on average. A kept value of 5 selects the sixth name in the list, Antigua and Barbuda.
What happens when you press Spin
The form has no fields, so one press is the whole interaction. On submit the script draws the name first, then turns the graphic. The wheel is painted as 193 thin wedges that alternate two theme colours, each wedge about 1.87 degrees of the circle, and it rotates 1,800 degrees, five full turns, plus the small offset that parks the winning wedge under the marker at the top. A 700 millisecond transition plays and the script waits 750 milliseconds before it reports. The status line then reads Selected plus the country name, and the button label changes to Spin again. If your system asks for reduced motion, the result appears without the wait.
Limits worth knowing before you use it
This page draws from the fixed 193 name list and nothing else. There is no text box, so you cannot edit entries, drop a country after it comes up, filter by continent, or give one country a heavier share. Each press returns exactly one name. Spins are also independent, which means repeats: a back to back repeat sits at 1/193, a chosen country appears somewhere in ten spins about 5 percent of the time, and covering all 193 names takes around 1,128 spins on average. The drawing code refuses any pool longer than 250 entries, so 193 sits comfortably inside that guard.
Good fit, wrong fit, and the tool to use instead
The set works when a lesson or a quiz needs one defensible sovereign state: a geography prompt, a reading topic, a trade or migration case study, or a random place to research. It is the wrong tool when the task needs dependent territories recognised, a region only draw, or a shortlist of names you chose yourself. For those, type your own lines into the custom wheel page, which accepts 1 to 100 unique entries of up to 60 characters each with optional whole number weights. The related links under this section point to the number, letter, US state and custom wheel generators.
Checking a result you do not believe
Two parts of the page let you audit a spin. Open the panel labelled All 193 entries: the drawn name is always in that list, because the same baked list feeds both the panel and the drawing code, so they cannot drift apart. The wheel graphic itself is marked hidden from assistive technology, while the status line is a polite live region, which means a screen reader announces the selected name and skips the spinning wedges. The circle is a cue for sighted players, not the source of the answer, and it never overrides what the draw returned.
UN non-member observers: The Holy See and State of Palestine are observers, so they are outside this member-state set.
Country dataset source: Names were derived from this dataset with an explicit correction to exclude its incorrectly marked Holy See entry.
Download the derived country list: The derived list is available under the Open Database License.
Open Database License: Attribution and share-alike terms for the country database.
Frequently asked questions
How many countries are in this wheel?
193, the member states of the United Nations. The Holy See and the State of Palestine are observer missions, so they sit outside the pool, and dependent territories are not included either. Every entry carries weight 1, which means one spin lands on any given country with a 1/193 chance, about 0.52 percent. The panel under the button prints all 193 names in alphabetical order, so you can count the pool yourself.
Can I remove a country after it comes up?
No. This generator has no input fields, so nothing drops an entry, and every press reuses the full 193 name pool. If you need a shrinking list, type the remaining names into the custom wheel page instead. It accepts 1 to 100 unique lines of up to 60 characters each, with optional whole number weights, and you can delete a line between spins.
Can I draw more than one country at a time?
Not here. One press returns exactly one name, and the form has no quantity control. The number generator on this site does return 1 to 100 values in a single run and can switch on a no repeat mode, but it produces integers rather than country names. To collect several countries, press Spin again and note each result as it appears.
Why did the same country come up twice?
Because spins are independent and drawn names are never removed from the pool. The chance that the previous country appears again on the next press is 1/193, and a country you are waiting for turns up somewhere in ten spins about 5 percent of the time. Repeats follow from equal weights, they are not a fault in the draw, and the entry list stays unchanged after every spin.
Is the result actually random?
The draw reads random bytes from your browser's crypto layer and maps them to a position by rejection sampling. For 193 entries a single byte supplies 256 values, values 0 to 192 are accepted and the remaining 63 are discarded and re drawn, so no position gains extra weight. If that crypto source is unavailable, the form reports a generation failure instead of inventing an answer.
Where do these country names come from?
They were derived from an open country dataset, with one explicit correction that keeps the mislabelled Holy See entry out of the list. This page links the upstream dataset, the derived file at /data/countries.json, and the Open Database License terms that cover it. The names keep short English forms, which is why Czechia and Ivory Coast appear instead of longer official versions.