To avoid the excess bandwidth and noise enhancement penalty involved in the pulse shaping method for peak-toaverage power ratio (PAPR) reduction of single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) signals, we propose a novel alternative method, called probabilistic pulse shaping. A set of weighting windows with zero excess bandwidth is designed to weight the outputs of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) precoder of a block of SC-FDMA symbols in a slot. Then the candidate signal blocks with different weighting windows for each block are generated with the designed low-complexity implementation scheme and the one with the lowest PAPR is selected to be transmitted. At the receiver, the received data can be detected in the same way as that of the conventional SC-FDMA using the defined equivalent channel without side information. It is shown by simulations that the proposed method achieves considerable improvements over the conventional SC-FDMA system in terms of both PAPR and bit error rate (BER) performance with low additional complexity.Index Terms-Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), pulse shaping, single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA), discrete Fourier transform (DFT) precoder.