hadron

American

[had-ron] / ˈhæd rɒn /

noun

Physics.

any elementary particle that is subject to the strong interaction. Hadrons are subdivided into baryons and mesons.

hadron British

/ ˈhædrɒn /

noun

any elementary particle capable of taking part in a strong nuclear interaction and therefore excluding leptons and photons

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

hadron Scientific

/ hăd′rŏn′ /

Any of a class of subatomic particles composed of a combination of two or more quarks or antiquarks. Quarks (and antiquarks) of different colors are held together in hadrons by the strong nuclear force. Hadrons include both baryons (composed of three quarks or three antiquarks) and mesons (composed of a quark and an antiquark). The combination of quark colors in a hadron must be neutral, for example, red and antired (as in a pion) or red, blue, and green (as in a proton).
Compare baryon lepton

Other Word Forms

hadronic

adjective

Etymology

Origin of hadron

1962; < Greek hadr ( ós ) thick, bulky + -on ¹

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

hadron

Based on this picture, it seems reasonable to assume that the disorder of the system, known as entropy, should change between the early parton phase and the later hadron phase.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 5, 2026

In contrast, an electron-positron collision consumes the colliding particles’ full energy and produces no extraneous sprays, so physicists often use an e+e- collider to scrutinize the new particles discovered at a hadron collider.

From Science Magazine ● Mar. 27, 2024

So why do they need an even larger hadron collider?

From BBC ● Feb. 4, 2024

This brought the LHC’s hadron bounty up to 62 according to a tally kept by Patrick Koppenburg, a particle physicist with Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics in Amsterdam.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 11, 2021

Although quarks have never been directly observed, several predictions of the quark model were quickly confirmed, and their properties explain all known hadron characteristics.

From Textbooks ● Aug. 12, 2015

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023