Prewellordering
In set theory, a prewellordering is a binary relation that is transitive, total, and wellfounded (more precisely, the relation
is wellfounded). In other words, if
is a prewellordering on a set
, and if we define
by
then is an equivalence relation on
, and
induces a wellordering on the quotient
. The order-type of this induced wellordering is an ordinal, referred to as the length of the prewellordering.