Paraphony is the property of an electronic musical instrument that can produce multiple notes or voices, but falls short of being truly polyphonic because the voices are not fully independent since they share at least one common element. For example, there might be just one single filter working on all voices collectively rather than the one filter per voice of truly polyphonic instruments; or there might be only one envelope generator.
One well-known paraphonic synth is the Korg Poly-800, which had 8 oscillators and could produce 8 voices (or 4 2-oscillator voices), but had just one filter.