random
The candidates were randomly selected by a computer.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments.
randomly generated email addresses
He would randomly show up at my house at 7 a.m.
You can't just randomly take things that don't belong to you.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Chance and randomness
accident
accident of birth
aleatory
arbitrarily
arbitrariness
coincidence
crapshoot
even money
fluke
fluky
long shot
luck
luck into something
more by accident than designidiom
more by luck than judgmentidiom
randomness
serendipitous
serendipitously
sortition
stumble into something

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Not expected or planned

randomly | Business English

randomly
adverb
uk /ˈrændəmli/us
in a way that happens, is done, or is chosen by chance rather than following any system, plan, or rule:
randomly allocated/assigned/selectedMembers are being issued with new ID cards that use a randomly assigned number.
Most people shop to fairly consistent patterns and very few shop completely randomly.

Examples of randomly

randomly
The order of the assessments (medical and psychological) was randomly assigned within each subject group.
A random railway is a random 3-regular multigraph where each vertex is regarded as a switch in a randomly chosen orientation.
Patients can be randomly allocated to different treatment groups using tables of random numbers.
Moreover, most of the classroom studies did not randomly assign students to classes.
This is a reasonable assumption because individual trees serving as parents are usually selected randomly from natural populations.
Five starting prices, which were chosen based on answers to open-ended questions in the pilot survey, were assigned to respondents randomly and roughly proportionately.
In total, there were 8 different design conditions differing by page order and the pictures asked about, to which the sample was randomly allocated.
The sequence looked like a long and continuous series of randomly located targets.
The spectral reflectance of the test surface in the second image varied randomly from trial to trial.
These were placed randomly in a tunnel covered with a black polyethylene mesh and equipped with a microsprinkler system controlled by an electronic humidity sensor.
Strains having these profiles were randomly selected from different cyclone affected areas.
Two independent coders performed a pilot test on thirty randomly selected articles.
The five baits inspected at any given census were randomly selected from those baits that had not been previously examined.
There is clear evidence that rodents are not evenly or randomly distributed within sewerage systems.
Again, half of all respondents were randomly assigned the proposal framed either as a gain (more influence) or a loss (less influence).
See all examples of randomly
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.