quanta

American

[kwon-tuh] / ˈkwɒn tə /

noun

the plural of quantum.

quanta British

/ ˈkwɒntə /

noun

the plural of quantum

"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

quanta Cultural

sing. quantum In physics, discrete bundles in which radiation and other forms of energy occur. For example, in the Bohr atom, light is sent out in quanta called photons. (See quantum mechanics.)

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.

At wide-open throttle, the raunchiness doesn’t come in wild quanta but in one smoothly linear, incredibly steep exponential function, with no interval for tactility and feedback.

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 30, 2025

It is especially notable to this process that the emergent composite fermion particle is unique in that the electron captures six quantized magnetic flux quanta, forming the most intricate composite fermion known to date.

From Science Daily • Feb. 21, 2024

The analysis confirmed that both the input and output of the experiment were single quanta of energy.

From Scientific American • Jun. 19, 2023

General relativity does not contain any notion of quanta; a quantum theory of gravity is an ambition that remains unfinished today.

From New York Times • May 8, 2023

Sometimes the light quanta seemed to measure out at three or four meters long; sometimes they appeared to be “just a little bundle of energy,” Beams recalled.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik

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