lepton
9.9
A small old Greek coin worth one hundredth of a drachma
- noun
- /ˈlɛp.tɒn/
- Archaic
:
lepto
- In Greece, a lepton is worth one one-hundredth of a drachma.
Examples
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He found an old lepton while cleaning out his grandfather's coin collection.
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The lepton was once commonly used before the euro was adopted in Greece.
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When my colleagues and I in the 1960s started thinking about looking for charged leptons more massive than the muon, I was motivated by my sequential lepton model.
Academic text (1997) -
The next use of accelerators, and the last use in which a new lepton was found, was my group's discovery of the tau using the electron-positron circular collider SPEAR.
Academic text (1997)
Surface Forms
Etymology
Lepton comes from the Greek word leptos meaning 'thin' or 'small', and it was the name for a very small Greek coin, so the word originally meant a 'small piece'.
