Every arrangement, laid out.

What it does

The Combination Generator enumerates arrangements of a set. You provide items — product names, colors, team members, letters, or test values — and the tool returns every group of a chosen size. The result is plain text, one arrangement per line, joined by a separator you control.

There are four modes. Combinations choose groups without caring about order.Permutations care about order. Two lists pairs every item from one list with every item from another. Letters treats the input as a string of characters and generates groups of letters. Each mode shares the same display cap and reports the true total separately.

Combinations vs permutations

The distinction is easy to miss until the output is twice as long as expected. Suppose you have three people — Ada, Ben, and Cara — and you need a two-person team. The combinations are Ada + Ben, Ada + Cara, and Ben + Cara. There are three, because the order within a team does not matter.

Now suppose you are assigning a president and a vice-president. Ada + Ben and Ben + Ada are different tickets. The permutations are Ada + Ben, Ada + Cara, Ben + Ada, Ben + Cara, Cara + Ada, and Cara + Ben. There are six, because order matters.

The tool reports the total before generation, using the standard formulas. If the total is enormous, it still generates up to the display cap and tells you that the list is truncated. That is a deliberate compromise: you can see the shape of the result without freezing the tab.

Pairing two lists

Two-list mode is a Cartesian product, not a combination. Every line from the first list is paired with every line from the second, and the order follows the input. It is the fastest way to build variant names — colors and sizes, first names and last names, product codes and regions — without writing a nested loop.

The separator is a free-text field. A space produces “red small”; a hyphen produces “red-small”; an at sign produces “red@small”. The tool does not add spaces around the separator, so type the exact string you want between the two parts.

Examples

red
blue
green

red blue
red green
blue green

There are three groups, not six, because “blue red” is the same group as “red blue”. Switch to permutations if the order is part of the result.

First list: red, blue
Second list: small, large

red / small
red / large
blue / small
blue / large

Every combination appears once. If the two lists are long, the product grows quickly: ten by ten is already one hundred pairs, and the display cap may cut it off.

abcdef

ab
ac
ad
ae
af
bc
bd
be
bf
cd
ce
cf
de
df
ef

Letter order follows the input. With repetition on, “aa” and “bb” would also appear. This is an enumeration aid, not a word finder: the tool does not check whether a group is a real word.

Limits worth knowing

• The display cap is a hard ceiling. The default is 10,000 arrangements, and the input allows up to 100,000. Beyond that, the page would spend more time rendering than the result is worth.
• Identical results can be removed. When the input contains duplicate items — two people named Sam, two products with the same code — the same arrangement can be generated more than once. “Remove identical results” deduplicates it.
• Combinations with repetition are multisets. “AA” is allowed, but the tool does not generate every ordering of a multiset. Use permutations for ordered arrangements.
• Blank lines are ignored. A blank line is not an item. If you need an empty value as a deliberate option, enter a placeholder such as “(none)”.
• Large inputs are not a shortcut to a large result. The tool refuses impossible selections, such as choosing four items from a list of three without repetition, instead of returning an empty list with no explanation.
• Nothing is stored. The input and output disappear on refresh. Copy the result before leaving.

Page updated 27 October 2026