quark

Meaning

1. (particle) In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist in isolation, but only in combinations in hadrons such as neutrons and protons or in quark–gluon plasmas.
2. (broadly) An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
3. (broadly, slang) A nonsense, trivial text string.

Synonyms

quark cheese

fromage frais

curds

cottage cheese

farmer's cheese

hadron

soft cheese

squark

Translations

Quark

quark

quark

quark

quark

quark

fromage blanc

quark

κουάρκ

requesón

كوارك

kuark

caillebotte

Pronounced as (IPA)

/kwɔːk/

Etymology

Cognate with Polish: twaróg

In summary

Sense 1 (“subatomic particle”) was coined by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) in 1963, apparently an arbitrary word. Subsequently, in a letter dated 27 June 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, Gell-Mann associated the word with the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and indicated that he pronounced the word /kwɔɹk/, reasoning that the sentence referred to a call in a pub for “three quarts”. However, the context in the book indicates that quark is probably a variant of quawk (“harsh call of a bird”) and was intended by Joyce to be pronounced /kwɑːk/, the modern pronunciation.