parallelism

noun

par·​al·​lel·​ism ˈper-ə-ˌle-ˌli-zəm 

-lə-ˌli-,

ˈpa-rə-

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

Synonyms

• similarity
• resemblance

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

This is not to defend Cook, but rather to illustrate the parallelism and hypocrisy of the rule of law being subordinated to the law of the ruler. —Jason Ma, Fortune, 26 Aug. 2025

DiLoCoX pioneers a number of novel techniques, including pipeline parallelism, adaptive gradient compression, one-step-delay communication overlaps and local training, to create a decentralized AI training environment that scales to unprecedented heights. —Atharva Gosavi, Interesting Engineering, 22 Aug. 2025

Speed, locality and parallelism will define success as workloads outpace traditional network and storage designs. —Expert Panel®, Forbes.com, 5 Aug. 2025

StarCore’s architectures used a long instruction word architecture that encoded multiple, independent operations in a single instruction in order to exploit parallelism in DSP code. —IEEE Spectrum, 30 June 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1610, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing parallelism

• psychophysical parallelism

Rhymes for parallelism

• activism
• ageism
• albinism
• altruism
• aneurism
• animism
• aphorism
• atomism
• barbarism
• bolshevism
• botulism
• brahmanism

Kids Definition

parallelism

noun

par·​al·​lel·​ism ˈpar-ə-ˌlel-ˌiz-əm 

: the quality or state of being parallel

especially : similarity of construction of word groups especially for effect or rhythm

Medical Definition

parallelism

noun

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

: 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