Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Baryon
/ˈbæriɒn/noun
A subatomic particle made of three quarks, such as a proton or neutron.
The Greek roots
βαρύς
barús
heavy
Literally: “heavy one”
Follow a root:βαρύς5 words
The story of the word
Abraham Pais proposed the name in 1953, sorting particles by mass: baryons heavy, mesons middling, leptons light. Mass turned out to be the wrong criterion, and the modern definition counts quarks instead, but the names stuck. Cosmologists still speak of baryonic matter, meaning the ordinary stuff that stars and people are made of, roughly five per cent of the universe.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1953
Same family
barometerbaritoneisobarbarometric
In a sentence
Only about five per cent of the universe is baryonic matter.
Why there is more matter than antimatter is called the baryon asymmetry problem.