A thinning algorithm is a very important procedure in order to increase recognition rate in the character recognition. This paper is the study of a parallel thinning algorithm available for the recognition of various characters, and it proposes the parallel thinning algorithm using the 8-neighbors connectivity value. Characteristics of the proposed algorithm are easiness of implementation of parallelism, the result of thinning is perfectly-8 connectivity and represented by numeric information. The proposed algorithm is very suitable for characters having many curve segments such as English, Japanese etc. Performance evaluation was performed by the measure of similarity to reference skeleton.