From David Squire, University of Geneva
Quark is pronounced “kwork” by physicists everywhere, not just by
Americans—at least that has been my experience
(Feedback, 23 May).
The word, in its physics context, was coined by Murray Gell-Mann, and he has
always insisted that this was the correct pronunciation. In his book The
Quark and the Jaguar, he says:
“In 1963, when I assigned the name `quark’ to the fundamental constituents of
the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been
`kwork’. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegan’s Wake by
James Joyce, I came across the word `quark’ in the phrase `Three quarks for
Muster Mark’.
“Since `quark’ (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly
intended to rhyme with `Mark’, as well as `bark’ and other such words, I had to
find an excuse to pronounce it as `kwork’ . . .
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“I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry
`Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be `Three quarts for Mister Mark’, in which
case the pronunciation `kwork’ would not be totally unjustified. In any case,
the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”
The correct pronunciation “kwork” is well known, even if not always
observed.
