Maths and words...
How many 5 letter words are there such that each letter is in alphabetical order?
(i.e. AFMNX is valid but, MALYZ is not )
Details and Assumptions:
1) The word doesn't have to mean anything
2) It is irrelevant whether the letters are in capitals or not.
The answer is 65780.
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1 solution
Choosing 5 letter words such that each letter is in alphabetical order has a 1-1 correspondence with unordered 5 letter words. To see this suppose I choose 5 letters out of a hat, BCEAD in that order. Then this one unordered word can be rearranged to make ABCDE. This means the number of possible words total to: ( 5 2 6 ) = 6 5 7 8 0