The act of changing the arrangement of a given number of elements

Usage examples of permutation.

I had chastised Lucy in every manner, playfully, pedantically, paternally, militarily, passionately, dispassionately, and in every tempo, allegro, largo, andante, di minuetto, with every paddle, strap, pliant rod, and whip in every room in my house, as she presented her fanny, bared or lightly covered, while lying across my knees, kneeling on beds, couches, chairs, footstools, or as she crawled upstairs, for one smack of my belt on each step, or bending over tables, desks, sinks, tubs, toilets, kitchen work surfaces, washing machine and dryer, followed by all the permutations of sensual penetration.

They discussed the latest permutations of the hairdo fashions while the blind shampooers plied their trade.

Deep into five-letter permutations, she can lose her way, suddenly unfixed from the letters and their strange internal rhythms.

They can take a chaotic soup of free aminos and arrange them, from out of a staggering number of linear permutations, into a sequence that gives them enzymatic sense.

As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they traveled.

All possible trigrammatic permutations of the two produced eight figures.

Staff of Power, but like everything else in the gnoll village, they represented a grotesque permutation of what was natural and beautiful.

Miss Bradley, heavy and rather subservient, treated with cool, almost amused contempt by Hermione, and therefore slighted by everybody--how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the innumerable permutations that make up the game.

Experience and instinct combined to send him after the right indices, the right permutations, the right rubrics, the right depths.

They discussed the latest permutations of the hairdo fashions while the blind shampooers plied their trade.

These and all their possible permutations are ways he talks, joking or mortally serious, over a beer or the phone in a bluesy baritone that slides to whiskey bass depending on his mood.

She gave Kim a lengthy explanation of molecular modeling and how she was attempting to create drugs that were permutations of Ultra’s basic structure and that would potentially share some of Ultra’s bioactivity.

Even a message enciphered on a three-rotor enigma might take twenty-four hours to decode, as the bombes clattered their way through the billions of permutations.

Today's the day, and soon I'll be this capricornis personality, yet one more permutation in a line of permutations stretching back to the dawn of life.

I have a very limited capacity for the primitive permutations of tortillas, bean-mush and chillies that numb the palate and sear the insides from Dallas to Cape Horn.