Generate a random organ from 128 organs and internal structures across eight body systems -- each with what it does and the fact worth knowing about it.
An organ is a group of different tissues working together on one job -- the heart is muscle, nerve, connective tissue and lining assembled into a pump. The usual count is 78, but that number is a convention rather than a measurement: it treats the skin as one organ and the heart as one organ, and it has to make arbitrary calls about whether the teeth count and whether a gland the size of a grain of rice does. Five are usually called vital, meaning you cannot live without them at all: brain, heart, liver, at least one lung and at least one kidney. Plenty of the rest are survivable to lose -- the spleen, the gallbladder, the appendix, one kidney, the stomach -- which is a reminder that "organ" is a description of structure rather than a ranking of importance. Organs group into eleven systems, and most belong to more than one: the pancreas is digestive and endocrine at once, and the throat is shared by the digestive and respiratory tracts, which is the entire reason choking is possible.
This generator draws from 128 entries covering the organs of the human body and the named structures inside them -- the four chambers of the heart, the lobes of the brain, the segments of the gut. Eight groups sort them by system, from the digestive tract to the immune and lymphatic tissues. Anything that comes as a pair is listed once unless the two genuinely differ, as the lungs do.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
Biology and anatomy revision, medical and nursing exam prep, quiz and flashcard writing, science-lesson prompts, and picking an organ at random to read up on properly.
Generate draws one organ at random from 128 using cryptographically secure randomness, and never repeats what is on screen in single-result mode. Filter to a system to revise one at a time, and raise the amount to deal a whole set -- with No Duplicates on, every entry in the draw is different. Each result carries a line on what that organ actually does.
A sample of what this generator can draw, spread evenly across the full list:
Because 78 counts whole organs and stops there, which is too coarse to be much use. This list also holds the parts anyone learning anatomy actually names -- the heart's four chambers and four valves, the brain's lobes, the stretches of the intestine -- which brings it to 128.
More than most people expect: the spleen, the gallbladder, the appendix, one of the two kidneys, one lung, the stomach, the colon, and the reproductive organs. The five you cannot do without are the brain, heart, liver, at least one lung and at least one kidney.
The skin, at roughly two square metres and around 15% of body weight. The largest internal one is the liver, which is also the only organ that regenerates -- a donor's remaining lobe grows back to near full size within months.
Yes -- the filter offers digestive, heart and circulation, airways and lungs, brain and nerves, endocrine glands, urinary and reproductive, senses and skin, and immune and lymphatic. Pick one or several and the draw comes only from those.