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
Quanta Magazine, 15 June 2026
The images showed how quarks carrying different fractions of the pion’s momentum are distributed across the particle.
—Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 12 June 2026
The building blocks of atomic nuclei, quarks and gluons, floated around loosely in a kind of primordial soup.
—Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 23 May 2026
Six quarks, six leptons, and antiparticles comprise the fermions.
—Big Think, 27 Apr. 2026
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Cite this Entry
“Quark.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quark. Accessed 19 Jun. 2026.
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