Parallel lines or objects are the same distance apart along their entire length and never meet. More generally, parallel can describe things that are similar and happen at the same time.
From Old French 'paralel', from Latin 'parallelus', from Greek 'parallēlos', from 'para' meaning 'beside' and 'allēlōn' meaning 'one another'. It literally means 'beside each other'.
The idea of 'parallel' is so basic that the word hasn’t changed much from ancient Greek to modern English. It’s one of those deep geometry ideas that got frozen in language and then reused for everything from stories to computer processing.
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