# particle

Pronunciation: US say "PAR-ti-kuhl" /ˈpɑɹtɪkəl/; UK say "PAH-ti-kuhl" /ˈpɑːtɪk(ə)l/

## Noun

1. A very small piece or fragment of matter, especially the smallest possible part of something.
   - Simple: A tiny piece of something, sometimes the smallest piece there can be.
   - _Tiny particles of dust hung in the beam of sunlight._
   - _The filter traps every particle larger than a grain of pollen._
2. Any of the elementary or subatomic physical objects, such as those that make up an atom.
   - Simple: One of the very tiny things that atoms are made of.
   - _Physicists smash particles together at nearly the speed of light to see what new ones appear._
   - _The neutrino is a particle so light and elusive that trillions pass through your body every second._
3. A tiny amount or degree of something.
   - Simple: A very small amount of something.
   - _There wasn't a particle of truth in his story._
   - _She showed not a particle of fear as she walked onto the stage._
4. A word with no meaning of its own that must go with another word to convey meaning, often marking a grammatical category, like "to" in "to eat" or "O" in "O Canada."
   - Simple: A small word that means nothing alone and works only with another word, like "to" in "to eat."
   - _In Japanese, the particle wa marks the topic of a sentence._
   - _Mandarin speakers add the particle ma to turn a statement into a yes-or-no question._
5. A part of speech whose words never change form by inflection, such as adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.
   - Simple: A kind of word that never changes its form, like "and" or "under."
   - _Because it never changes its ending, the Latin word et is classed as a particle._
   - _The student was relieved to find that particles, unlike nouns and verbs, have no endings to memorize._
6. In the Roman Catholic Church, a small fragment of the consecrated host, or one of the smaller wafers given to lay communicants.
   - Simple: In the Catholic Church, a crumb of holy bread from Mass, or a small bread given to people at Communion.
   - _The priest gathered every particle from the paten so that none would be lost._
   - _The sacristan set out a ciborium of particles for the congregation's communion._

## Origin

From Middle French particule and its source, Latin particula (“small part, particle”), a diminutive of pars (“part, piece”).

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/particle (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).