PARITY

I. noun (plural -ties) Etymology: Latin paritas, from par equal Date: 1608 the quality or state of being equal or equivalent, 2. equivalence of a commodity price expressed in one currency to its price expressed in another, equality of purchasing power established by law between different kinds of money at a given ratio, an equivalence between farmers' current purchasing power and their purchasing power at a selected base period maintained by government support of agricultural commodity prices, 4. the property of an integer with respect to being odd or even , b. the state of being odd or even used as the basis of a method of detecting errors in binary-coded data, ~ bit , the property of oddness or evenness of a quantum mechanical function, the symmetry of behavior in an interaction of a physical entity (as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image, II. noun Etymology: -parous Date: 1878 the state or fact of having borne offspring