What does Exclusive in XOR really mean?

language-agnostic math logic boolean xor
Legend picture Legend · Mar 5, 2011 · Viewed 13.8k times · Source

Maybe this is just obvious to everyone but can someone explain where XOR (or Exclusive-OR) got its name from? What does the word Exclusive really mean? Not that it matters, but its just stuck in my head since morning.

OR:
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1

XOR:
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0

Is it "exclusively 0 for inputs 1,1", "special version of OR" or something else?

Answer

dlanod picture dlanod · Mar 5, 2011

XOR is an "exclusive OR" because it only returns a "true" value of 1 if the two values are exclusive, i.e. they are both different.

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