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I have a list of 1,626 random words.

How can I work out the total number of combinations abiding to a limit of 12 words per thing ?

E.g

dog fish cat whale shark snake spider eagle nine dog clam ray dog fish cat whale shark snake spider eagle nine dog ray clam dog fish cat whale shark snake spider eagle nine dog clam ray dog fish cat whale shark snake spider eagle dog nine clam ray

mattyboo
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    It's hard to understand what exactly you're asking. I don't even see at first glance how the stuff below "e.g." is an example of what is said above. – Dan Shved Jan 22 '14 at 14:59
  • The examples are combinations, what I have give is 3, i wanted to know how many I can make out of 1,626 words with a limit of 12 per line. – mattyboo Jan 22 '14 at 15:41
  • delete this dunno how to – mattyboo Jan 22 '14 at 15:41
  • Are you sure you've given 3 examples? I've counted 48 words. Maybe there are 4 examples there? It would be nice to have some separators between examples. If you do that, we will be much closer to understanding what it is that you mean by combinations. So far, it doesn't seem like you want subsets (as Ross's answer assumes). Maybe you want what is called $n$-tuples, where $1 \leq n \leq 12$. In this case the answer will be much larger than in Ross's version. – Dan Shved Jan 22 '14 at 16:20

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Are you asking for the number of subsets of $n$ of your $1626$ words for $n$ up to $12$? It is ${1626 \choose n}=\frac {1626!}{n!\cdot (1626-n)!}$ but for small $n$ you don't want to calculate the factorials. You could see Wikipedia

Ross Millikan
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  • Thanks for that, is their any calculators to work this out? Ive had a look around but can't find any, im not a maths person at all really :( – mattyboo Jan 22 '14 at 15:44
  • For small $n$ it isn't that much computation. For $n=4$ it becomes $\frac {1626 \cdot 1625 \cdot 1624 \cdot 1623}{4 \cdot 3 \cdot 2 \cdot 1}$. It is the first equation of the Wikipedia article I linked to. – Ross Millikan Jan 22 '14 at 16:14