Quark

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /kwɔːk/, /kwɑːk/
• US IPA: /kwɔɹk/, /kwɑɹk/
• Rhymes: -ɔː(r)k, Rhymes: -ɑː(r)k
• Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)k

First used in 1963 by one of the theorists who postulated the existence of quarks, Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann coined the name these new particles. The literary connection to 's was asserted later, see the Wikipedia article.

Full definition of quark

Noun

1. (particle) In the Standard Model, an elementary subatomic particle which forms matter. Quarks have never been found alone as of this writing, They combine to form hadrons, such as protons and neutrons.
• 1993, Gell-Mann won the linguistic battle once again: his choice, a croaking nonsense word, was "quark". (After the fact, he was able to tack on a literary antecedent when he found the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in Finnegans Wake, but the physicists quark was pronounced from the beginning to rhyme with "cork".) — James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
• 2012, Jeremy Bernstein, A Palette of Particles, There were also particles no one had predicted that just appeared. Five of them in order of increasing modernity, ... are the neutrino, the pi meson, the antiproton, the quark and the Higgs boson.
2. (computing, X Window System) An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.

Derived terms

• antiquark

Related terms

• quarkonic

German Quark, from late Middle High German twarc, from a language, compare Polish twaróg.

Alternative forms

• qvark

Noun

1. A soft creamy cheese, eaten throughout northern, central, and eastern Europe, very similar to cottage cheese except that it is usually not made with rennet.

Onomatopoeia, from the sound of the squawk.

Noun

1. (Falkland Islands (informal)) The black-crowned night heron, Nycticorax nycticorax.----