document.write( "Question 227351: Jasmine says that there are 362,880 distinguishable permutations of the letters in the word TEXTBOOKS. Do you agree?
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Algebra.Com's Answer #168994 by Edwin McCravy(20062) $\"\"$ $\"About$

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Jasmine says that there are 362,880 distinguishable permutations of the letters in the word TEXTBOOKS. Do you agree?
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document.write( "If the T's and the O's were distinguishable, say one of them\r\n" );
document.write( "were red and the other blue, different colore,\r\n" );
document.write( "like this: \r\n" );
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document.write( "TEXTBOOKS\r\n" );
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document.write( "there would be 9! ways, and then 352,880 would be correct.\r\n" );
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document.write( "However, let's look at one of those.\r\n" );
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document.write( "KOBXTSETO\r\n" );
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document.write( "The 9! counts these 4 separately:\r\n" );
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document.write( "KOBXTSETO\r\n" );
document.write( "KOBXTSETO\r\n" );
document.write( "KOBXTSETO\r\n" );
document.write( "KOBXTSETO\r\n" );
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document.write( "and similarly every permutation is counted 4 times. However all\r\n" );
document.write( "the letters are the same color, and so these 4 cannot be told\r\n" );
document.write( "apart.  So we have to divide the 9! by 4 to get the number of\r\n" );
document.write( "distinguishable permutations.  So the answer is not 362880 at\r\n" );
document.write( "all.  It's\r\n" );
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document.write( "Edwin

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