Word.ws English Dictionary

quarks

quarks is the plural of quark.

Meaning of quark

Noun (1)

quark (plural quarks)

  1. (particle) 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.
    • A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin #92;frac#123;1#125;#123;2#125;, z#61;#123;-#92;frac#123;1#125;#123;31964 February 1, M[urray] Gell-Mann, “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons”, in Physics Letters, volume 8, number 3, Amsterdam, North Holland: North-Holland Publishing Company, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC...
    Synonyms:
    ace
  2. (broadly, X Window System) An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
    • Two functions are provided to convert between strings and quarks: XrmStringToQuark and XrmQuarkToString […] The second takes a quark as its parameter and returns a pointer to its associated string; it is used primarily for debugging and runtime error messages.1992, Keith D. Gregory, “Resources Revisited”, in Programming with Motif, New York, N.Y.: Springer-Verlag New York, →DOI, →ISBN, page 453
  3. (broadly, slang, X Window System) A nonsense, trivial text string.

Noun (2)

quark (uncountable)

  1. A soft, creamy, unripened cheese made from cow's milk, originating from and eaten throughout central, northern, eastern, and southeastern Europe, as well as the Low Countries.

Noun (3)

quark (plural quarks)

  1. (informal, Falkland Islands) The black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax).
    Synonyms:
    quawk

Phrases with quarks

5 more phrasesFewer phrases

Questions about quarks

What is quarks the plural of?
Quarks is the plural of quark.

Words near quarks in the dictionary

  1. quarkonia
  2. quarkonic
  3. quarkonium
  4. quarkoniumlike
  5. quarkoniums
  6. quarks
  7. quarkyonic
  8. quarl
  9. quarle
  10. quarles
  11. Quarleses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quarks (page history and authors); quark (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “quarks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quarks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.