equality
- 1Treatment of people that is the same for everyone, regardless of social or cultural differences.
Like a race where everyone starts at the same line, with no one given a head start.
Activists campaigned for racial equality across schools and public services.
The new law was meant to guarantee equality of opportunity for every citizen.
Oppositeinequality, discrimination
- 2The condition of being equal in quantity, status, or worth.
Like a seesaw that stays level because both ends carry the same load.
The treaty established equality among all member nations.
Negotiators insisted on equality between the two parties before signing.
Similarparity, equivalence, balance, equity
Oppositeinequality, disparity, imbalance
Note
The broadest sense, and the one the word's history belongs to: it came through Middle French equalité from Latin aequālitās, and it is a doublet of equity, which reached English from the same Latin source by another route. It is usually uncountable and often takes a qualifier naming the kind of sameness meant, as when F. A. Hayek wrote in 1949 of "the ideal of material equality."
- 3The relationship between two quantities that have the same value.
The equality between the two expressions holds for every value of x.
Proving the equality required showing both quantities reduced to the same number.
Similarequivalence
Oppositeinequality
Note
In mathematics the word names a relation rather than a condition: the claim that two expressions denote the same value, written with the equals sign. Such a relation is reflexive, symmetric and transitive. Here the plural comes naturally, since a proof may chain several equalities, each one carrying a value from one expression to the next.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French "equalité" (modern French "égalité"), from Latin "aequālitās." It is a doublet of "equity," and by surface analysis it is "equal" plus "-ity."