Let and be permutation groups. Then their wreath product is defined as the semidirect product where operates on by permuting the components. Note that this is itself a permutation group, acting on by letting act trivially on the first and naturally on the second factor and letting act on such that the -th component of permutes naturally and fixes everything else pointwise.
Examples
Every group is a permutation group on its underlying set (the regular representation aka the Cayley-Yoneda embedding ) and often only this special case is considered so that people speak of “the wreath product ” for abstract groups and without mentioning their permutation representations.
the dihedral group of order is the wreath product (in this sense of regular representations).
The sylow--subgroups of the symmetric groups can be recursively described as the wreath product where is the cyclic group of order and with .
The sylow--subgroups of for can be recursively described as a wreath product of the sylow--subgroup of a strictly smaller and a sylow--subgroups of a suitable symmetric group.