XOR

Short for exclusive or.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɛks ˈɔɹ/, /ˈzɔɹ/

XOR (plural XORs)

1. (logic) The connective "exclusive or". One way to state its meaning in plain English is "if either A or B, but not if both."

   The XOR of (0,0) is 0; (0,1) is 1; (1,0) is 1; and (1,1) is 0.

   • 2025 August 30, “Logic Gates - Definition, Types, Uses”, in GeeksforGeeks‎^[1], archived from the original on 11 September 2025:

     The XOR gate can take only two inputs at a time and give an output. The output of the XOR gate is high (1) only when its two inputs are dissimilar i.e., if one of them is low (0) then other one will be high (1).

2. (electrical engineering) A logic gate that implements "exclusive or".
3. (programming) The symbolic representation that implements "exclusive or".

   XOR can be used to add bits without carrying.

• Boolean variables and states (AND, OR, NOT, TRUE, FALSE etc.) are commonly written in all uppercase in order to distinguish them from the ordinary uses of the words.

• exclusive OR
• XOR gate
• ex-or
• NOT equivalence

• (antonym(s) of “electrical engineering”): XNOR

XOR (third-person singular simple present XORs, present participle XORing, simple past and past participle XORed)

1. (transitive, computing) To perform the XOR function upon.
   • 1989, IEEE Communications Society, Conference Record:

     The XORed sequence has the same period as the sequence that is not XORed.

   • 1998, Stafford Tavares, Henk Meijer, Selected Areas in Cryptography:

     XORing different constants into the four s-boxes in such a cipher has exactly the same effect as XORing a single constant into each round function output.

   • 2007, Reinhard Wobst, “Life After DES: New Methods, New Attacks”, in Angelika Shafir, transl., Cryptology Unlocked, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, →ISBN, section 3 (IDEA: A Special-Class Algoritmh), subsection 5 (Cryptanalyzing IDEA), page 239:

     There are weak keys in the sense that their use by foisting chosen plaintexts can be proved, which could be interesting for chip cards with a ‘burnt-in key’. First of all, however, these keys can be easily avoided—one only needs to XOR all subkeys with the hexadecimal number 0x0dae—and second, the probability that such a key can be caught is 2⁻⁹⁶; that is about one out of 10²⁹ randomly selected keys (this number even has a name: 100 quadrilliards).

• ⊻

• AND
• OR
• NAND
• NOR
• NOT
• XNOR

• rox

XOR m (plural XORs)

1. alternative spelling of xor