Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of a group of six elementary particles having electric charges of a magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, regarded as constituents of all hadrons. See Table at subatomic particle.
- n. A soft creamy acid-cured cheese of central Europe made from whole milk.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Same as quawk.
Wiktionary
- n. In the Standard Model, an elementary subatomic particle which forms matter. Quarks are never found alone in nature and combine to form hadrons, such as protons and neutrons.
- n. a soft creamy cheese. The Russian quark and Finnish quark are somewhat different. The Russian version is firmer in consistency and contains about 15% milk fat, whereas the Finnish quark often contains less than 1% milk fat.
WordNet 3.0
- n. fresh unripened cheese of a smooth texture made from pasteurized milk, a starter, and rennet
- n. (physics) hypothetical truly fundamental particle in mesons and baryons; there are supposed to be six flavors of quarks (and their antiquarks), which come in pairs; each has an electric charge of +2/3 or -1/3
Etymologies
- From Three quarks for Muster Mark!, a line in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.German, from Middle High German quarc, from Lower Sorbian twarog, from Old Church Slavonic tvarogŭ.
Examples
“Seeing the word "quark" in James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" induced him to make the spelling change.”
“The “beauty” quark is particularly good for probing this question because b-quarks and anti-b-quarks behave “more differently” than other particles and their antimatter counterparts.”
“The heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature and understood to be an ingredient of the nuclear soup just after the Big Bang.”
“When the neutrino beam method was invented by the Columbia team at the beginning of the 1960s the quark concept was still unknown, and the method has only later become important in quark research.”
“But to understand the structure of the new psi particle a fourth quark is very likely necessary, in the opinion of many researchers.”
“The result is what researchers call a quark-gluon plasma QGP, which hasn't been present in significant quantities since shortly after the origin of the Universe.”
“In both cases, the top quark is short-lived and decays, for example, into a bottom quark, a lepton (such as a muon) and a neutrino.”
“Actually, the word quark is in the OED as a verb meaning ` croak, 'with 19th-century references to frogs, rooks, and herons.”
“He is perhaps best known for borrowing the word quark from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake ( "Three quarks for Muster Mark") and giving it a radically new meaning.”
“Had Gell-Mann been a Lewis Carroll enthusiast, he might have named his hypothetical particles snarks; but instead he borrowed the word quark from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘quark’.
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Ar!
ar, Ar, argon, are, area, arf, arc, ark, aardwolf, aardvark, aardcucumber, yardarm and 252 more...
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The Cheese Connoisseur's List of...
Names of cheeses from around the world, blatantly stolen from every source available to me.
"A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye." - Jean Anthelme Brillat-S...edam, cheddar, jack, monterrey jack, mozzarella, mozzarella di bufala, mozzarella fior d..., mozarella affumicata, scamorza, parmesan, gorgonzola, emmenthal and 256 more...
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Nonce
A nonce word is a word used only "for the nonce"—to meet a need that is not expected to recur. Quark, for example, was formerly a nonce word in English, appearing only in James Joyce's Finnegans Wa...
kwyjibo, fnord, wug, blicket, dax, toma, pimwit, zav, speff, tulver, gazzer, fem and 21 more...
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RitaJKing's list
transparency
shimmer, fantastical, sansula, rapture, melancholy, obviated, parenthetically, apoplexy, indelible, pillory, demagogues, quark and 41 more...
hernesheir "Oi, quark is listed in the OED as a verb", he croaked hoarsely. Oct 24, 2011
hernesheir A soft white unaged cheese of Eastern Europe. Not to be confused with Quark in Germany, which is more akin to yoghurt. Also qvark. Jan 30, 2010
tbtabby A Secret Squirrel cartoon featured an evil, sentient quark as a villain. He was flattening the United States one structure at at time, destroying structures by pulling out the bottom atom. He planned to turn the country into a parking lot, then flatten Canada to make room for a giant amphitheater...where he would perform. The best part was the way he was defeated...Secret pointed out that quarks are defined as hypothetical particles, so he didn't really exist. Thus, he disappeared in a puff of logic. Sep 7, 2009
gangerh (fd) A fission boat.
(Thanks R Thomas) Jan 21, 2008
seanahan I'm down with what you're saying Sionnach, that quarks have a certain charm, although that sounds pretty strange. You're usually on top of such things, and cut straight to what's up and getting to the bottom of such things. Hopefully bashing WordNet is just a flavor of the week, since it isn't actually a dictionary. Dec 3, 2007
sonofgroucho @sionnach: I apologise for my ignorant apostrophe: consider it removed. Dec 2, 2007
yarb I didn't know that Joyce invented quarks. Hail Wordie! Dec 2, 2007
sionnach SoG. Yes it does, courtesy of Murray Gell-Mann. Though, for reasons which are obscure (to me, at any rate), the name of Joyce's magnum opus/convoluted practical joke on scholars is written without an apostrophe. Dec 2, 2007
sonofgroucho I believe the word comes from Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. Dec 2, 2007
sionnach I think quarks have a certain je ne sais quoi, how you say it, charm.
Unless you are in Germany where quark is just another name for a faintly gritty yogurt-like substance. Dec 2, 2007
chained_bear But it's not a true hypothesis--it's a hypothetical, truly fundamental particle... or am I misunderstanding?
Ah, who cares. It's still WeirdNet. Dec 1, 2007
bilby I'm fascinated by true hypotheses. I sprinkle them in the garden between the gnomes. Dec 1, 2007