Origin Story
It may surprise you that the name of the quark — the tiniest grain of matter — came straight out of a novel. In 1963, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann had discovered smaller particles making up protons and neutrons, and he was wrestling with what to call them. He already had the sound of the word fixed in his head when, while reading James Joyce's notoriously dense novel Finnegans Wake, he stumbled on the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" Since the particles happened to come in groups of three, he knew at once he had found his name. In that instant, a word of uncertain meaning from a novel became the name of the most fundamental particle in the universe. Science and literature do, on occasion, meet like this.
There is a theory that Joyce's quark echoes the German word for "curds" (a cheese made from soured milk). The idea that the universe's most basic particle might trace back to a word for cheese shows just how boundless the world of etymology can be.
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Online Etymology Dictionaryquark (n.): 1964, applied by U.S. physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who associated it with a word in Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," from German Quark "curds, rubbish"
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Merriam-Webster Dictionarycoined by Murray Gell-Mann, from the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
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Oxford English Dictionaryquark: arbitrary coinage by M. Gell-Mann, adopted from a word in Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
Quark comes from the line "Three quarks" in a novel. Remember: "three particles, three quarks in a sentence."
""The smallest particle in the universe took its name from a novelist's playful word.""
