Did you know?
If you were a physics major, chances are that James Joyce didn’t make it onto your syllabus. While literature majors are likely more familiar with his work, Joyce has a surprising tie to physics. In the early 1960s, American physicist Murray Gell-Man came up with the word quork, which he used to refer to his concept of an elementary particle smaller than a proton or neutron (by his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects). He later settled on the spelling quark after reading a line from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.” The name stuck and has been used by physicists ever since.
Examples of quark in a Sentence
Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 9 May 2025
Electrons, protons and their constituent quarks… photons.
—Steven Strogatz, Quanta Magazine, 17 Apr. 2025
In these conditions, the quarks may arrange and combine themselves differently in situations that would be instantly unstable in any other environment.
—Paul Sutter, Space.com, 28 Apr. 2025
As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons.
—Quanta Magazine, 2 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for quark
Cite this Entry
“Quark.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quark. Accessed 18 May. 2025.
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