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 a similar trait in related species or lineages following divergence (see divergence 1c) from a common ancestor
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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 of parallelism from the Web
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But whether its convergence or parallelism, what sort of environment selects for intelligence?
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The stories had a pleasing parallelism to them — the random travel from place to place, the studious tracking of the specimen.
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The parallelism allows qubits to do more calculations simultaneously.
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Both businesswomen join the war effort at the same time, fall out of fashion at the same time, and so on, but the parallelism of their careers, signalled by a split-screen set, is too neat and repetitive a theme to sustain two acts.
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Parallelism in coding is hard, at times unintuitive, that’s true.
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.
First Known Use of parallelism
1610
Other Mathematics and Statistics Terms
PARALLELISM Defined for English Language Learners
parallelism
playDefinition of parallelism for English Language Learners
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: the fact of being similar in development or form
Medical Dictionary
parallelism
playMedical 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
Learn More about parallelism
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See words that rhyme with parallelism Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for parallelism Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about parallelism
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