In group theory, the growth rate of a group with respect to a symmetric generating set describes the size of balls in the group. Every element in the group can be written as a product of generators, and the growth rate counts the number of elements that can be written as a product of length n.
Suppose G is a finitely generated group; and T is a finite symmetric set of generators (symmetric means that if then ). Any element can be expressed as a word in the T-alphabet