gluon

noun

glu·​on ˈglü-ˌän How to pronounce gluon (audio)
: a hypothetical neutral massless particle held to bind together quarks to form hadrons

Examples of gluon in a Sentence

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It is composed of smaller particles called quarks and gluons, bound by the strong interaction. Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 13 Sep. 2025 Protons and neutrons, meanwhile, aren’t fundamental particles, but are composite particles composed of quarks and gluons. Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 9 Sep. 2025 Last year, Yang began to use analog simulations to tackle how the strong force might have behaved during some of the universe’s very earliest moments, when the quarks and gluons that later became bound up in hadrons may have existed as an unbound soup, called quark-gluon plasma. Shalma Wegsman, Quanta Magazine, 5 Sep. 2025 During high-energy collisions of lead nuclei at the LHC, scientists can momentarily recreate quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed just millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 9 May 2025 See All Example Sentences for gluon

Word History

First Known Use

1971, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of gluon was in 1971

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Cite this Entry

“Gluon.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gluon. Accessed 21 Sep. 2025.

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