Added 9 October 2026
quark
/kwɑːk/ noun
In Latin: quarcum, quaricum Coined: 1929, by Murray Gell-Mann Wiktionary
noun Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). Pronunciation from Wiktionary, via Kaikki.org. More about quark at Wordnik → Where our words come from →
- 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.
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An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
(Can we add an example for this sense?)
- An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
noun
noun
- The black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax).
Origin
Etymology 1 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.
From Wiktionary, via Kaikki.org (CC BY-SA)