n.
Pronunciation: ' per- ə -t ē , ' pa-r ə -
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -ties
Etymology: Latin paritas, from par equal
Date: 1608
1 : the quality or state of being equal or equivalent
2 a : equivalence of a commodity price expressed in one currency to its price expressed in another 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
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 (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 (as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image