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
William Barter, Space.com, 1 Aug. 2025
In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks.
—Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 16 July 2025
The LHCb experiment is the only machine in the world that can summon sufficient energies to make baryons containing beauty quarks.
—Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 16 July 2025
There's ample pickle coverage on the bottom of the sandwich (a must), and the light, creamy pimento cheese (a blend of quark and cheddar curds) plays like a cool companion to the spicy honey and peppers.
—Keith Pandolfi, The Enquirer, 3 July 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 23 Aug. 2025.
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