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From Fermi + -on. Named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi. Coined by English physicist Paul Dirac in 1945 in a lecture titled "Developments in Atomic Theory".
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
fermion
Today it means: Any elementary or composite particle that has half-integer spin and thus obeys Fermi–Dirac statistics and the Pauli exclusion principle (equivalently, a particle for which the wavefunction of any system of identical such particles changes sign whenever two are swapped); a baryon, a lepton or a quark; Full definition →