Okay, that makes sense. Of course the LIMIT won't work the way I need
it, since often I get no results (not to mention the performance hit
I'm taking of having to create 20K rands every time I do a simple
search). Oh well.

Thanks,

Walter

toby wrote:

> I think the short answer is that the WHERE expression, hence RAND(), is
> being independently evaluated for each row.
>
> Try:
> SELECT word FROM nouns ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;
>