Etymology

Noun

1. Speed, full speed; impetuosity, force.
   • 1485, Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, Book I.10:

     And therwith two of them dressid their sperys, and Ulfyus and Brastias dressid theire speres, and ranne to gyder with grete raundon.

2. An undefined, unknown or unimportant person; a person of no consequence.

   The party was boring. It was full of randoms.

Adjective

1. All outcomes being unpredictable and, in the ideal case, equally probable; resulting from such selection; lacking statistical correlation.

   The flip of a fair coin is purely random.

   The newspaper conducted a random sample of five hundred American teenagers.

   The results of the field survey look random by several different measures.

2. Of or relating to probability distribution.

   A toss of loaded dice is still random, though biased.

3. Pseudorandom in contrast to truly random; mimicking the result of random selection.

   The rand function generates a random number from a seed.

4. Representative and undistinguished; typical and average.

   A random American off the street couldn't tell the difference.

5. Apropos of nothing; lacking context; unexpected; having apparent lack of plan, cause or reason.

   That was a completely random comment.

   The teacher's bartending story was interesting, but random.

   The narrative takes a random course.

Compounds

• at random
• randomnitude
• randomology
• randomosity
• non-random
• pseudorandom
• random number