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
Robert Lea, Space.com, 21 Feb. 2025
Researchers might be able to confirm this possibility by making complementary measurements of EDMs in other particles built from quarks where the coupling is likely to be different.
—Luke Caldwell, Scientific American, 1 Feb. 2024
This has revealed for the first time that quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons, experience the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
—Robert Lea, Space.com, 7 Jan. 2025
That explosion of energy converts itself into a quark and antiquark pair.
—Henry Carnell, Quanta Magazine, 10 Jan. 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 13 Mar. 2025.
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