Etymology

quark

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Today it means: In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist in isolation, but only in combinations in hadrons such as neutrons and protons or in quark–gluon plasmas. Full definition →

German Quark
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quark · noun1

Etymology 1 sense 1 (“subatomic particle”) was coined by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) in 1963, apparently an arbitrary word. Subsequently, in a letter dated 27 June 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, Gell-Mann associated the word with the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and indicated that he pronounced the word /kwɔɹk/, reasoning that the sentence referred to a call in a pub for “three quarts”. However, the context in the book indicates that quark is probably a variant of quawk (“harsh call of a bird”) and was intended by Joyce to be pronounced /kwɑːk/, the modern pronunciation.

quark · noun2

  1. German · borrowed fromQuark“cottage cheese; curds; curd cheese”
  2. English todayquark

[Alt: A spoonful of quark cheese served with tomato slices on a plate] Borrowed from German Quark (“cottage cheese; curds; curd cheese”). Doublet of tvorog and twaróg.

quark · noun3

Onomatopoeic, from the sound of the squawk.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.