A shortest common superstring of a finite collection of strings is a string of minimum length containing every member as a substring (Black 2020). Overlapping occurrences can reduce its length. For example, abc is a shortest common superstring of ab and bc.
Shortest Common Superstring
See also
String, SubstringExplore with Wolfram|Alpha
References
Black, P. E. "Shortest Common Superstring." In Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures (Ed. P. E. Black). National Institute of Standards and Technology, Nov. 2, 2020. https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/shortestCommonSuperstring.html.Cite this as:
Weisstein, Eric W. "Shortest Common Superstring." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ShortestCommonSuperstring.html