longitudinal parity

storage, communications An extra byte (or word) appended

to a block of data in order to reveal corruption of the data.

Bit n of this byte indicates whether there was an even or odd

number of "1" bits in bit position n of the bytes in the

block. The parity byte is computed by XORing the data bytes

in the block. Longitudinal parity allows single bit errors to

be detected.

(1996-03-01)