Multiset

In mathematics, the notion of multiset (or bag) is a generalization of the notion of set in which members are allowed to appear more than once. For example, there is a unique set that contains the elements a and b and no others, but there are many multisets with this property, such as the multiset that contains two copies of a and one of b or the multiset that contains three copies of both a and b. The term "multiset" was coined by Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn in the 1970s. The use of multisets in mathematics predates the name "multiset" by nearly 90 years: Richard Dedekind used multisets in a paper published in 1888.