How did quarks get their name?

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, when he first proposed the existence of sub-atomic particles that made up protons and neutrons, gave them the name "quarks". The word comes from James Joyce's "Finnigan's Wake," in which it is a nonsense word made up by Joyce.

Quarks are of six types called flavors, which are Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top and Bottom. Only the Up and Down quarks are stable and usually found in nature. The other quarks are found in high energy particle collisions. Their antiparticles are denoted with a bar above and differ in some properties like the electrical charge. Quarks are spin 1/2 particles, meaning they are fermions, that is they are mass particles as opposed to bosons which are force particles, like the photon.