longitudinal parity

longitudinal parity [‚län·jə′tüd·ən·əl ′par·əd·ē]

(communications)

Parity associated with bits recorded on one track in a data block, to indicate whether the number of recorded bits in the block is even or odd.

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(storage, communications)

longitudinal parity - 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.