Row

Row refers to a horizontal line or arrangement of objects, people, or data. In everyday language, a row describes items placed side by side in a single line, such as seats in a theater, crops in a field, or products on a shelf. The term is often used to describe positioning and order.

In mathematics and computing, a row is a horizontal subset of a two-dimensional structure. In a matrix, a row consists of the elements in one horizontal line, and a matrix with m rows and n columns has m rows. A row vector is a 1-by-n matrix or array of n elements. The corresponding vertical counterpart is the column. Many programming languages treat a two-dimensional array as a collection of rows accessed via a row index together with a column index.

In data management, a row (often called a record) represents a single entry or observation, with each column (or field) providing a particular attribute. In relational databases, rows contain the actual data for each entity, while columns define the attributes. Rows are typically identified by a unique key to distinguish records.

Memory layout in computing distinguishes row-major and column-major order. Row-major order stores all elements of a row contiguously in memory before moving to the next row, whereas column-major order does the reverse. This choice influences data access performance and interoperability between programming environments.