I have some words: shapes<- c("Square", "Triangle","Octagon","Hexagon") I want to arrange them in pairs: shapescount<-combn(shapes, 2) shapescount [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [1,] "Square" "Square" "Square" "Triangle" "Triangle" "Octagon" [2,] "Triangle" "Octagon" "Hexagon" "Octagon" "Hexagon" "Hexagon" I want to count each of the groupings of the letters in the pairs, for instance first pair is "6" for "Square" and "8" for "Triangle" giving me "14" for the first pair, and so on.