The pumping lemma tells us that any arbitrary regular language has a pumping length p, with the property that every string in this language can be pumped if it has length at least p. In fact, ifp is a pumping length for some language L, then so is any length p> p. Define the smallest pumping length for L to be the smallest nonnegative integer p such that p is a pumping length for L. As an illustration, if I