Fortune Cookie Online

How the Online Fortune Cookie Works

Tap the cookie. It cracks in two and the slip rises out from between the halves with a fortune, six lucky numbers and a word of Chinese, the three things a takeout slip carries. Type a question first if you have one, or crack a plain cookie and take what comes.

The cookie holds its answer for a question for the whole day. Ask the same thing twice and the slip reads the same, which keeps the fun honest: you cannot crack until you like what it says. A plain cookie takes the next place on the plate, so cracking another always gives a fresh slip. There is no artificial intelligence behind any of it. The fortunes are 100 original lines, split between luck, love, work, a little wisdom and a few that are only there to make you laugh, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

Where Fortune Cookies Come From

The fortune cookie is not Chinese. The folded wafer with a paper fortune tucked inside is Japanese: tsujiura senbei, “fortune crackers”, were baked by hand near shrines and temples around Kyoto in the nineteenth century, larger and darker than the modern cookie, flavoured with miso and sesame rather than vanilla, with the fortune pinched into the fold on the outside rather than hidden within. A woodblock print from 1878 shows a man grilling them in a Japanese shop, and a few family bakeries near Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine still make them the old way.

Japanese immigrant bakers carried the cookie to California. The Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park served them in the early 1900s, and bakeries in Los Angeles and San Francisco supplied them to restaurants. During the Second World War, when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps, Chinese restaurants took over making and serving the cookie, and by the 1950s it was a fixture of the Chinese-American meal. Los Angeles and San Francisco both claim the invention; in 1983 a mock trial in San Francisco's Court of Historical Review found for San Francisco, to nobody's surprise.

Today around three billion fortune cookies are made every year, most of them in the United States by a handful of factories, and the largest, in Brooklyn, turns out millions a day. The cookie is almost unknown in China itself, where attempts to sell it in the 1990s were met with puzzlement.

The Lucky Numbers

Lucky numbers appeared on American slips as a way to fill the space under a short fortune, and they stayed because people played them. They are not predictions. Six numbers between 1 and 69 are picked with the fortune, which is the range the big American draws use, and they are exactly as likely to come up as any other six.

They have agreed with a draw once. In March 2005 the Powerball draw produced 110 second-prize winners instead of the usual four or five, enough that the lottery suspected fraud. Every winner had played the same five numbers, and every one of them had taken those numbers from a fortune cookie slip printed by the same Brooklyn factory. The cookie's sixth number missed the Powerball by two, which is why they shared a second prize and not a jackpot.

Other Ways to Ask

• Magic 8-Ball shakes out one of the twenty classic answers.
• Ouija Board Online lets the planchette spell its answer letter by letter.
• Yes or No Oracle answers with a full written interpretation instead of a slip.
• Chinese Zodiac Calculator finds your animal and element from your birth date.

See them all on the Yes or No page.

Frequently Asked Questions