permutation

UK/ˌpɜː.mjʊˈteɪ.ʃən/US/ˌpɝ.mjʊˈteɪ.ʃ(ə)n/

nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,518 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: permutations

A permutation is one of the possible orders a set can be put in. Every permutation of four letters.

Order matters in a permutation and does not in a combination, which people mix up constantly. The number grows terrifyingly fast, since ten things have over three million permutations.

Definitions of permutation

1nounpermutationOne of the possible orders a set can be put in.C1
“They tried every permutation and none of them worked.”

permutation is an arrangement.

Where it comes from

Latin permutatio, a change through, from mutare, to change, the root of mutable and mutation.

Medieval Latin
permūtātiōnem
Old French
permutacïon
Middle English
permutacioun
English, today
permutation

From Middle English permutacioun, permutacyoun, from Old French permutacïon, promutatïon and Medieval Latin permūtātiōnem, accusative of permūtātiō. Morphologically permute + ation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

permutation in the wild

The group of all permutations of a set M is the symmetric group of M, often written as Sym(M).
Permutation group
The term permutation group thus means a subgroup of the symmetric group.
Permutation group
In mathematics, a permutation is a bijection of a set onto itself.
Permutation
Anagrams of a word whose letters are all different are also permutations: the letters are already ordered in the original word, and the anagram reorders them.
Permutation
In computer science, bogosort (also known as permutation sort and stupid sort) is a sorting algorithm based on the generate and test paradigm.
Bogosort

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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