particle

Forms

1.A very small piece of matter, a fragment; especially, the smallest possible part of something.
- Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
- Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity.
2.A part of speech that has no inherent lexical definition but must be associated with another word to impart meaning, often a grammatical category: for example, the English word to in a full infinitive phrase (to eat) or O in a vocative phrase (O Canada), or as a discourse marker (mmm).
3.A part of speech which cannot be inflected.
4.Any of various physical objects making up the constituent parts of an atom; an elementary particle or subatomic particle.
- What, he asked himself, does quantum theory have to say about the familiar properties of particles such as position?
- The physics of elementary particles in the 20th century was distinguished by the observation of particles whose existence had been predicted by theorists sometimes decades earlier.

Uncommon· #3525

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

Semantically displaced native Old English grot whence modern English groat.