Quarks

The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize for Physics laureate, gave the name of "quarks" to one of the two types of fundamental particles from which the matter is made up (the other type are the leptons). He borrowed the name from this chapter of Finnegans Wake. This made-up word reproduces the sound of the three cheers the seabirds give to King Mark ("Muster Mark") at the beginning of Joyce's version of the story of Tristan and Isolde.

Curiously enough, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" matches one of the actual quantities in which physical quarks can be found: associated in a number of three in baryons (or two in mesons), and never individually.

See "quark" in Wikipedia.