County Maps US

Tools Coordinates

Random Location Generator

Up to 100 points at a time, uniformly distributed over the sphere, with a place name on request for any of them.

How to use it

  1. Choose how many points (1 to 100) and where: anywhere, land only, or inside one country.
  2. Press Generate. The points are pinned on the map and listed with their coordinates.
  3. Press Name on any row to reverse geocode that one point. Names are fetched one at a time on request, not for the whole list.
  4. Download the list as CSV or GeoJSON.

How it works

Points are drawn uniformly on the sphere: longitude uniform in 360 degrees and latitude as the arcsine of a uniform value, so every square kilometre is equally likely rather than every degree. For "land only" and "inside a country" the tool keeps drawing until the point lands inside a Natural Earth 1:110m country polygon (rejection sampling, done in the browser). Antarctica counts as land.

The 1:110m outlines smooth coastlines to about 10 km, so a "land" point can occasionally sit just offshore and small islands are never chosen. Place names come from Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), one request per second, which is why they are fetched per row.

Questions

Are the points truly random?
They come from the browser's cryptographic random number generator and are spread evenly by area. A list of 100 "anywhere" points will have about 71 in the ocean, which is the right proportion.
Can I generate points inside a US state or a city?
Not with this tool; the smallest unit is a country. Generate a larger batch and keep the rows whose place name, fetched with the Name button, is in the area you want.
Why is my "inside Fiji" point in the sea?
Country outlines at 1:110m are coarse and small islands are missing entirely, so for island nations some points fall in the water between the drawn islands.

All map tools, free and without an account. Location data is processed in your browser and by the open geocoding services named on the sources page; nothing is stored by this site.