Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Equality; similarity or close correspondence or equivalence as regards state, position, condition, quality, degree, etc.
  • noun In logic,analogy; similarity; similar or like course, as of reasoning or argument.
  • noun Specifically, in ecclesiastical history,the equality of religious bodies in their relations to the state, their standing in universities, etc.; the principle of such equality; in Presbyterian churches, the equality of all the members of the clerical order.
  • noun The condition of being able to bear offspring.
  • noun In banking and com.: An equivalence in the currency of another country. See mint par, under par.
  • noun Equivalence in or between money of different metals as legal tender, in the proportions of weight and quality fixed by law.
  • noun Same as par, 3.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality or condition of being equal or equivalent; a like state or degree; equality; equivalence; close correspondence; analogy.
  • noun (Finance) Equivalence in value to the currency of another country.
  • noun (Physics) A property assigned to elementary particles, conceptualized as a form of symmetry, representing the fact that no fundamental distinctions can be observed between right-handed and left-handed systems of particles in their interactions, and supported by the typical observation that the total parity of a system is unchanged as particles are created or annihilated; however, certain interactions involving the weak force have been shown to violate the principle of conservation of parity.
  • noun (Physics) A property of the wave function of a system, which takes the value of +1 or -1, indicating whether the value of the wave function changes sign if each of the variables of the system is replaced by its negative.
  • noun (Med.) The condition of having borne a child or children, alive or dead.
  • noun (Math.) The property of being even or odd.
  • noun (Computers) The property of having an even or odd number of bits set to the value of 1 (as opposed to 0); -- applied to bytes or larger groups of bits in a data structure. It is used mostly in the process of parity checking. The parity of a data structure can be changed by changing the value of the parity bit.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun medicine, countable The number of times a woman has given birth.
  • noun agriculture, countable The number of times a sow has farrowed.
  • noun uncountable Equality; comparability of strength or intensity.
  • noun mathematics, countable A set with the property of having all of its elements belonging to one of two disjoint subsets, especially a set of integers split in subsets of even and odd elements.
  • noun mathematics, countable The classification of an element of a set with parity into one of the two sets.
  • noun physics, countable Symmetry of interactions under spatial inversion.
  • noun games, countable In reversi, the last move within a given sector of the board.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun functional equality
  • noun (computer science) a bit that is used in an error detection procedure in which a 0 or 1 is added to each group of bits so that it will have either an odd number of 1's or an even number of 1's; e.g., if the parity is odd then any group of bits that arrives with an even number of 1's must contain an error
  • noun (mathematics) a relation between a pair of integers: if both integers are odd or both are even they have the same parity; if one is odd and the other is even they have different parity
  • noun (physics) parity is conserved in a universe in which the laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as in a left-handed system
  • noun (obstetrics) the number of liveborn children a woman has delivered

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin paritas, from pariō ("give birth")

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French parité, from Latin paritas, from pār ("equal")

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