parity

• IPA^(key): /ˈpæɹɪti/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æɹɪti
• Homophone: parody (intervocalic flapping, weak vowel merger)
• Hyphenation: par‧i‧ty

From Middle French parité, from Late Latin paritas, from Latin pār (“equal”). Equivalent to pari- +‎ -ty.

parity (countable and uncountable, plural parities)

1. (uncountable) Equality; comparability of strength or intensity.
   • 2000 April 26, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Delta Guide, Pearson Education, unpaged:

     Altogether, Microsoft claims a 99% feature parity between 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

   • 2011 October 29, Phil McNulty, “Chelsea 3 - 5 Arsenal”, in BBC Sport‎:

     For all their frailty at the back, Arsenal possessed genuine menace in attack and they carved through Chelsea with ease to restore parity nine minutes before half-time. Aaron Ramsey's pass was perfection and Gervinho took the unselfish option to set up Van Persie for a tap-in.

2. Senses related to classification into two sets.
   1. (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.

      Parity is always preserved in such operations.

   2. (mathematics, countable) The classification of an element of a set with parity into one of the two sets.

      The particles' parities can switch at random.

   3. (computing) The count of one bits in a value, reduced to even or odd or zero or one.
   4. (physics, countable) Symmetry of interactions under spatial inversion.
3. (games, countable) In reversi, the last move within a given sector of the board.
4. Resemblance; analogy.

• chirality

From Latin paritas, from pariō (“give birth”).

parity (plural parities)

1. (medicine, countable) The number of delivered pregnancies reaching viable gestational age, usually between 20-28 weeks
2. (agriculture, countable) The number of times a sow has farrowed.