The question generator

One question at a time, in the register you choose. Free, nothing saved, and it works on a phone under a table.

Question generator

Pick a register

Press deal for your first question.

Answer it yourself too. The research this comes from escalated by turns. A question you would not answer is one you should not ask.

Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. No account, no email. We track anonymous page visits like the rest of the site, but that is all.

Which register you are in

The 1997 study everyone cites for this works because of the order, not the content. Escalation is the mechanism. The practical skill is not memorizing questions, it is noticing which register you are currently in and not jumping two ahead.

Register	Sounds like	What it is for
Opening	Anything they can answer without deciding how much to tell you	Establishing that this is a conversation and not an interview
Turning	Questions about preference, opinion and choice, where the answer reveals something but costs nothing	Finding out whether there is anything here
Deepening	Questions where the honest answer requires a small amount of nerve	The bit that actually produces closeness

Almost every failed attempt at this is a deepening question asked while both people are still in opening. The signal that you can move up is not how long you have known someone. It is whether the last two answers you got were longer than the questions.

When it stalls, stop asking questions

The common failure is not running out of questions. It is that a stack of unrelated questions makes the other person feel processed. Three things work better than dealing a new one.

Follow the last answer instead of moving on. Almost every answer contains a smaller thing you could have asked about, and asking about it signals you were listening rather than waiting.

Say something instead of asking something. Conversation stalls when it becomes unidirectional. Offering a piece of yourself unprompted gives the other person somewhere to go that is not answering.

Let the pause happen. Roughly two seconds of quiet reads as a disaster to the person who asked and as thinking time to the person answering. Filling it usually costs you the better answer.

What is deliberately not in here

Anything where the honest answer is a diagnosis. Anything about money, weight or family health, until they raise it. Rapid-fire either/or questions, which feel like a game show and produce nothing you can follow up. And the big abstract ones, the biggest regret and the deathbed question, which sound profound on a list and land as theatrical in a room.

Common questions

Is anything I tap saved or sent anywhere?

No. The generator runs entirely in your browser, and it doesn't collect anything you'd type in the first place, there's no input field to begin with. There is no account and no email. We track anonymous page visits like the rest of the site, but that is all there is to track here.

How many questions are there?

Twenty-eight, across the three registers. They are dealt in a random order, and one will not repeat until you have seen the whole register.

Can I use this on a first meetup?

Opening and turning, yes. Deepening is usually a second-meetup register, and reaching for it early is the single most common way this goes wrong. The generator will happily deal you one anyway, because that is your call and not ours.

Where do these come from?

They are the set from our longer piece on questions to get to know someone, which explains the reasoning behind each register and what the original research actually found.