quark

英文词源

quark

quark: [20] The term quark was applied to a type of fundamental particle by its discoverer, the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He seems first to have used quork, but then he remembered quark, a nonsense word used by James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake 1939, and he decided to plump for that. It first appeared in print in 1964.

quark (n.)

1964, applied by U.S. physicist Murray Gell-Mann (b.1929), who said in correspondence with the editors of the OED in 1978 that he took it from a word in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939), but also that the sound of the word was in his head before he encountered the printed form in Joyce. German Quark "curds, rubbish" has been proposed as the ultimate inspiration [Barnhart; Gell-Mann's parents were immigrants from Austria-Hungary]. George Zweig, Gell-Mann's co-proposer of the theory, is said to have preferred the name ace for them.