What is a commutator I've read wikipedia, tried examples ($S_3$ stuff) but I cannot understand why they are called "commutators" or what the set of them is.

Why is the set of commutators called &quot;commutator subgroup&quot;? (I read this one among other, I have done reading even I don't link all the tabs!)

It's in Lang's Undergraduate Algebra - page 35, question 10 part b. It's in A Book of Abstract Algebra by Pinter (page 152), but I still have no idea what this is.

My goal is to show that if $H$ is a subgroup of $G$ that contains all the commutators that $G/H$ is Abelian - please don't do this for me. I'm stuck with trying to work out what H is not the question.

See... if the result is true ($G/H$ being Abelian) then H is the set of things that don't commute because I'm factoring them out with the quotient operation. The identity of H will be left in the result (necessarily) thus the commutators that = the identity (ie the things that actually commute) are left in the group. 

So is this set of commutators $=\{x|x=aba^{-1}b^{-1}, \forall a,b\in G\}$ the reason I need this clarified is because then an Abelian group only has one commutator, the identity. 

Also the commutators don't actually commute! For example $(1,3)$ and $(1,3)(1,2)$ in $S_3$. Have I actually got the definition and the name has just confused me? Also both books say "a commutator of G is an element of the form" but there might only be one (for an Abelian one)

Could someone clarify please? 

Oh group generated means "the union of all the groups generated by each element of the set, generated as in $&lt;g&gt;=\{e,g,g^2....\}$"
If $a,b\in G$ then $ab=ba$ is equivalent to $aba^{-1}b^{-1}=e$ and so the commutator of $a$ and $b$ is a measure of the failure of $a$ and $b$ commuting with each other. However, as a measure alone, it is somewhat binary: either group elements commute or they don't. 

There are two ways we can quantify this measure. The first is by looking at (subgroups of) the symmetric group. Then, instead of asking if $a$ and $b$ commute, we can ask how many elements are moved around by their commutator. 

The second way is to look at the commutator subgroup as a measure of how noncommutative a group is. A group is commutative if it has a trivial commutator subgroup (and highly noncommutative if the commutator subgroup is the entire group). But we can then ask if the commutator subgroup is abelian. And if not, if it's commutator subgroup is abelian. And we can repeat the process of taking commutator subgroups many times and ask if we ever find the trivial group, and if so, how many times does it take?  And if not, how many times does it take before we keep on getting the same group repeating itself?  This gives the notion of solvable groups and their degree of sol ability. A similar notion gives nilpotent groups and their degree of nilpotency. Both are measures of how close to abelian our groups actually are.
We call it commutator, because it shows us the operation in the group is "how far" from commutativity.

Let $(G,\cdot)$ be a group. For all $g,h \in G$ we have $[g,h]=g^{-1}h^{-1}gh=e$ if and only if the group $(G,\cdot)$ is commutative.