combinatorial
Americanadjective
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of, relating to, or involving the combination of elements, as in phonetics or music.
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of or relating to the enumeration of the number of ways of doing some specific task or of arranging items in a specific configuration.
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Mathematics. of or relating to combination, or the modes, properties, etc., of combinations.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of combinatorial
First recorded in 1810–20; combinatory + -al 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Now they are solving classic problems in combinatorial geometry using algebraic number theory.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 30, 2026
And they also showed that sperm whale codas are indeed combinatorial, similar to the compositionally shown by bonobos and chimps.
From Salon ● May 29, 2025
The minigames within Lorelei almost included Nim, an ancient combinatorial game that appears in “Last Year at Marienbad.”
From New York Times ● May 15, 2024
This combinatorial power is a key building block of human speech, which mixes a finite number of sounds into a vast array of words to convey information.
From Science Magazine ● May 7, 2024
Simple combinatorial mathematics yielded twenty-seven unique combinations of these six gene variants.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
