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🇵🇹Portuguese Source WordCode: PT

quark

Pronunciation / Transliteration: kwark

🇬🇧 Direct English Meaning:
Quark/kwɔːrk/
nounCEFR C1 (Advanced)Top #14500 frequency
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🇵🇹 Example Sentence in Portuguese:

"Os quarks são partículas elementares da física."

Comprehensive Definitions & Senses

2 senses
As noun
  1. 1

    Any of a group of subatomic particles having a fractional electric charge and constituting the fundamental constituents of hadrons such as protons and neutrons.

    "Protons and neutrons are each composed of three quarks bound together by the strong force."
  2. 2

    A type of fresh, unaged dairy product similar to curd cheese or thick yogurt, originating in Central Europe.

    "She prepared a healthy breakfast bowl using fresh quark topped with berries and honey."
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Thesaurus & Semantic Spectrum

Antonyms & Contrasting Words (1)

Linguistic Origin & Historical Etymology

Coined by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann in 1964, who borrowed the nonsense word from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake ('Three quarks for Muster Mark!'). Gell-Mann originally pronounced it to rhyme with 'stork', but the spelling and modern pronunciation were influenced by the phonetic context of the novel. In physics, it was adopted to name the fundamental constituents of matter that make up hadrons like protons and neutrons.

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