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# randomly

«randomly» in Mova's school dictionary: **without a plan, pattern or reason, so that you cannot…** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples.

### part of speech

adverb (randomly)

### meaning for a pupil

1) Randomly means without a plan, pattern or reason, so that you cannot predict what will happen. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#m1)

2) Randomly means by chance, so that every choice has the same chance of being picked. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#m2)

### sense in the lessons

Maths (probability): picking a counter randomly from a bag means every counter has an equal chance; dice and spinners give random results. Science: in a fair test you may choose samples randomly. Computing: games use random numbers. Everyday speech: «randomly» can mean unexpectedly («he randomly started singing»). Phrases: chosen randomly, randomly picked, at random.

### examples

- The teacher randomly picked a name from the hat. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x1)
- A counter is taken randomly from the bag. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x2)
- The birds flew randomly around the field. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x3)
- The computer randomly shuffles the songs. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x4)
- She randomly started laughing in the middle of the lesson. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x5)
- The groups were chosen randomly to be fair. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/#x6)

### note

Adverb from «random» (+ly). In maths, «randomly» means each outcome has an equal chance unless the question says otherwise: if a bag has 3 red and 1 blue counter, picking randomly gives red 3 times out of 4 on average. People are bad at being truly random — patterns creep in.

### Trees and pragmatics

[Every meaning and example of «randomly» parsed by Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/R/randomly/), each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.