Three quarks for Muster Mark!

What's the matter, matter? What are you made up of?

Well, as a matter of fact, matter's made up of quarks and leptons. Leptons are a grouping for electrons, and muons (electron-like particles) and quarks are what protons and neutrons are made up of (according to the Standard model). This may not seem too interesting... except... how do you come up with a name like "quark"? The name doesn't have any latin or greek roots. It wasn't heavily used prior to the naming of quarks, but it does seem like a misspelling of an onomatopoeia for duck sounds. The answer is actually found in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

Incidentally, protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. What the nobel-prize-for-physics winning Murray Gell Mann was doing reading this book while studying subatomic particles remains a mystery. Even more of a mystery is why he chose this particular made-up word.