About the Random Emotion Generator
Actors doing cold reads, illustrators practising faces and novelists rewriting a flat scene all need a feeling handed to them rather than chosen. This generator holds 85 named emotions and hands back as many as you ask for. The list deliberately mixes obvious states such as anger and fear with harder shades like sheepishness, homesickness, indignation and numbness, because the interesting exercises live in the second group.
Each draw pulls from the browser cryptographic random source, so nothing repeats in a predictable cycle. Leave "No repeats" ticked and you will never see the same feeling twice inside one batch, which matters when you are assigning one emotion per person in a workshop. Ask for more than 85 with repeats off and the result simply stops at the size of the list instead of padding it out.
Two emotions drawn together make a stronger prompt than one, so try a batch of two and write the moment where a character moves from the first to the second. Improv groups often pair this with a setting: run the Random Environment Generator at the same time and act the scene where those two collide. If you want to split a class into pairs after handing out feelings, the Random Name Picker takes a pasted roster.
How to use
- Set How many emotions you want in one draw.
- Leave No repeats ticked so nobody in a group gets the same feeling.
- Choose a separator: one per line for a worksheet, commas for a spreadsheet cell.
- Press Generate again for a fresh set, then copy or download the list.
Common questions
- How many emotions are in the list?
- There are 85 entries, ranging from broad states such as joy and grief to narrower ones like wistfulness, spite and reassurance.
- Can I use this for an acting warm up?
- Yes. Draw one emotion per performer, or draw two and ask them to move from the first to the second inside a thirty second scene.
- Why does my batch stop short of the number I typed?
- With repeats off the tool cannot exceed the size of the word list. Untick the checkbox if you want a longer run with duplicates allowed.
- Are the results stored anywhere?
- No. The word list ships with the page and every draw happens locally, so nothing is sent to a server.