parallelism

noun

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par·al·lel·ism | \ ˈper-ə-ˌle-ˌli-zəm

, -lə-ˌli-, ˈpa-rə- \

Definition of parallelism

1 : the quality or state of being parallel the parallelism of architectural figures

2 : resemblance, correspondence parallelism between obesity and hypertension— H. M. Marvin

3 : repeated syntactical similarities introduced for rhetorical effect biblical poetry relies largely on parallelism of lines— E. P. Sanders

4 : a theory that mind and matter accompany one another but are not causally related

5 : the independent development of similar traits or features (as of body structure or behavior) in different species or lineages that have common ancestry and that typically occupy similar environments or ecological niches : parallel evolution

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Examples of parallelism in a Sentence

There is some degree of parallelism between the lives of the two women. There is a certain parallelism in the development of the two technologies.

Recent Examples on the Web However, edge compute performance does bring decreases in costs and increases in parallelism, while deep learning brings increases in efficiency and more capabilities into the reach of commercial scenarios. — Cyra Richardson, Forbes, "Robotics: Delivering 60,000,000 Years Of Evolution Within 60 Years," 7 Apr. 2021 Instead, since 2005, many of the gains in computing power have come from adding more parallelism via multiple cores, with multiple levels of memory. — Jennifer Ouellette, Quanta Magazine, "The Future Fabric of Data Analysis," 9 Oct. 2013 Larger SSDs can use more parallelism and operate with higher throughput than smaller ones. — Jim Salter, Ars Technica, "SSDs are on track to get bigger and cheaper thanks to PLC technology," 28 Sep. 2019 On the technical side of things, data-center-scale computing generally relies as much or more on massive parallelism as per-thread performance. — Jim Salter, Ars Technica, "Nvidia pushes ARM supercomputing," 17 June 2019 But the machine’s real power comes not through that massive parallelism, but in problems where possible solutions can be encoded in quantum waves that slosh among the qubits. — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, "How to evaluate computers that don’t quite exist," 26 June 2019 Sunny Cove cores find greater opportunities for parallelism by increasing the cache sizes. — Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld, "Surprise! Intel reveals 10nm Sunny Cove CPU cores that go deeper, wider, and faster," 12 Dec. 2018 As clock speeds tended to top out at 4GHz to 5GHz, parallelism—originally in the form of support for more processor threads, and later to more physical cores—kept the processor performance on an upward trajectory. — Mark Hachman, PCWorld, "Intel debuts 9th-generation Core chips, including Core i9 and X-series parts, with a few twists," 8 Oct. 2018 One is parallelism between an early battle which the protagonist loses, and a final fight which the protagonist wins. — Ciara Wardlow, The Hollywood Reporter, "What 'Tomb Raider' Forgets About Origin Stories," 17 Mar. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'parallelism.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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Last Updated

18 Apr 2021

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“Parallelism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parallelism. Accessed 21 Apr. 2021.

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More Definitions for parallelism

parallelism

noun

English Language Learners Definition of parallelism

formal : the fact of being similar in development or form

See the full definition for parallelism in the English Language Learners Dictionary

parallelism

noun

par·al·lel·ism | \ ˈpar-ə-ˌlel-ˌiz-əm, -ləl-

Medical Definition of parallelism

: a philosophical or psychological doctrine that there is a one-to-one correspondence between events in the mind and events in the brain but that the two sets of events exist without interacting in a causal way

— called also psychophysical parallelism