Definition of parity
plural parities
1
: the quality or state of being equal or equivalent
- Women have fought for parity with men in the workplace.
2 a
: equivalence of a commodity price expressed in one currency to its price expressed in another
- The two currencies are approaching parity for the first time in decades.
b
: equality of purchasing power established by law between different kinds of money at a given ratio
3
: an equivalence between farmers' current purchasing power and their purchasing power at a selected base period maintained by government support of agricultural commodity prices
- … parity is the price calculated to give the farmer a fair return in relation to the things he must buy.
- —New York Times
4 a
: the property of an integer with respect to being odd or even
- 3 and 7 have the same parity
b (1)
: the state of being odd or even used as the basis of a method of detecting errors in binary-coded data (see 2binary 5)
(2)
: parity bit
5
: the property of oddness or evenness of a quantum mechanical function
6
: the symmetry of behavior in an interaction of a physical entity (such as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image (see mirror image 1a)
