What does "fermion" mean?

Any elementary or composite particle that has half-integer spin and thus obeys Fermi–Dirac statistics and the Pauli exclusion principle (equivalently, a particle for which the wavefunction of any system of identical such particles changes sign whenever two are swapped); a baryon, a lepton or a quark;

Fermion

//ˈfɜːmɪɒn// noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
Any elementary or composite particle that has half-integer spin and thus obeys Fermi–Dirac statistics and the Pauli exclusion principle (equivalently, a particle for which the wavefunction of any system of identical such particles changes sign whenever two are swapped); a baryon, a lepton or a quark; particle
"The fermions treated by the Standard Model are the (composite) baryons and the (elementary) leptons and quarks."
2
any particle that obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics and is subject to the Pauli exclusion principle wordnet
3
Any elementary or composite particle that has half-integer spin and thus obeys Fermi–Dirac statistics and the Pauli exclusion principle (equivalently, a particle for which the wavefunction of any system of identical such particles changes sign whenever two are swapped); a baryon, a lepton or a quark; (slightly more loosely) any such particle or any composite particle composed of fermions.; any such particle or any composite particle composed of fermions. particle

Example

More examples

"The fermions treated by the Standard Model are the (composite) baryons and the (elementary) leptons and quarks."

Etymology

From Fermi + -on. Named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi. Coined by English physicist Paul Dirac in 1945 in a lecture titled "Developments in Atomic Theory".

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.