Number & MeasureGreek → English
Parallel
/ˈpærəlɛl/adjective
Running side by side at a constant distance and never meeting.
The Greek roots
παρά
pará
beside
ἀλλήλων
allḗlōn
of one another
Literally: “beside one another”
The story of the word
Παράλληλος is built on the reciprocal pronoun ἀλλήλων, so the word means beside-each-other rather than merely alongside something. Euclid's fifth postulate about parallel lines resisted proof for two thousand years, and the failed attempts to derive it produced non-Euclidean geometry. The figurative English use, drawing a parallel between two events, arrives in the sixteenth century.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Middle French → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
parallelogramparallaxparallelepiped
In a sentence
The two roads run parallel for a mile before the river splits them.