quark
/kwɑɹk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.05 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
noun
An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
noun
A soft, creamy, unripened cheese made from cow's milk, originating from and eaten throughout central, northern, eastern, and southeastern Europe, as well as the Low Countries.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin #92;frac#123;1#125;#123;2#125;, z#61;#123;-#92;frac#123;1#125;#123;3"
- "There are six known quarks in nature, the up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and the top quark. The quarks are arranged in three pairs or "generations". Each member of a pair may be transformed into its partner via the charged-current weak interaction. Together with the six known leptons (the electron, muon, tau, and their associated neutrinos), the six quarks constitute all of the known luminous matter in the universe. The understanding of the properties of the quarks and leptons and their interactions is therefore of paramount importance."
- "There were also particles no one had predicted that just appeared. Five of them are of interest to me here. In order of increasing modernity, they are the neutrino, the pi meson, the antiproton, the quark and the Higgs boson. […] It fairly rapidly became clear to physicists that free quarks were not going to be found. Making a virtue out of necessity, they invented a dynamics that would permanently confine quarks within particles. In this scenario quarks exchange particles called gluons. […] There is no escape. Quarks are imprisoned forever."
- "Two functions are provided to convert between strings and quarks: XrmStringToQuark and XrmQuarkToString […] The second takes a quark as its parameter and returns a pointer to its associated string; it is used primarily for debugging and runtime error messages."
Etymology
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *twerH-, Quark
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kwɑɹk/
- British English: /kwɑːk/