noun

• 1The state of being parallel or of corresponding in some way.

  ‘Greek thinkers who believed in the parallelism of microcosm and macrocosm’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Elsewhere, Kothari instructs the spectator to ‘look for the symmetrical reduplication and repetitive parallelism of dance patterns’.’
  • ‘Such parallelism can be both literary and historical; the two are not mutually exclusive.’
  • ‘Chris Baldick finds interesting parallelisms to this concept of defamiliarization in both Romantic poetry and in Brecht's theatre.’
  • ‘Deeper parallelisms involve the relation between false appearances and underlying sincerity or genuineness.’
  • ‘Some writers, however, have noted the parallelisms between an objectivistic Marxism and Whitehead's objective relativism.’
  • ‘Their journeys intertwine and overlap, and during sequences in which they go their separate but parallel ways, director Gustad employs jarring cross-cutting to remind us of their journeys' thematic parallelisms.’
  • ‘This is a play that works on its audience through juxtapositions (both ironic and evocative) and parallelisms that remind us that questions of self-identity in a shifting world are and will always be with us.’
  • ‘This book has the feel of something pieced together over time, with the parallelisms between its three parts carefully arranged but hardly spontaneous.’
  • ‘Orhan Veli's work is also full of repetition and parallelisms.’
  • ‘The parallelism is clear: between male social relations inside the novel, and those that produced its writing.’

  Synonyms

  similarity, likeness, resemblance, analogy, correspondence, equivalence, correlation

  1. 1.1The use of successive verbal constructions in poetry or prose which correspond in grammatical structure, sound, meter, meaning, etc.
     ‘parallelism suggests a connection of meaning through an echo of form’
     More example sentences

     • ‘the parallelisms are reinforced by frequent alliteration’
     • ‘In Psalms, to which St John the Baptist alludes, the trope of the ‘bridegroom’ occurs in a series of parallelisms, balanced by an explicitly competitive image.’
     • ‘Aside from the Yiddish / Hebrew parallelisms, Gordin's text sometimes uses two consecutive adjectives that basically have the same meaning, in order to double their effect.’
     • ‘An analysis of this speech reveals that the student used varied repetition strategies, including anaphora, antithesis, chiasmus, and parallelism.’
     • ‘Through alliteration, anaphora, parallelism and slant-rhyme, Sleigh builds momentum into the eleven, rhythmic couplets and suggests a train's smooth travel.’
     • ‘The phonemic patterning and the parallelism of phrase vocalize a concealed anxiety about the momentum and acceleration of this technological revolution.’
  2. 1.2Computing The use of parallel processing in computer systems.
     ‘massive parallelism gives neural networks a high degree of fault tolerance’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Supercomputing is, almost exclusively, parallel computing, in which parallelism is available at all hardware and software levels of the system and in all dimensions of the system.’
     • ‘To begin with, it is based on a grid architecture that uses a shared-nothing distributed approach and deploys performance features such as multi-threading, pipeline parallelism and partitioning.’
     • ‘Thus, continued improvement in supercomputer performance at current rates will require a massive increase in parallelism, requiring significant research progress in algorithms and software.’
     • ‘Sisal needs a C or Fortran compiler and an underlying operating system that implements parallelism in order to produce parallel code.’
     • ‘As part of the deal between Compaq and Intel also involves a program of joint engineering development focused on advanced parallelism for high-end computing.’