muon
/ˈmjuːɒn/noun
muon is a noun meaning “An unstable elementary particle in the lepton family, having similar properties to the electron but with a mass 207 times greater” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled M-U-O-N, and it appears about once in every 4 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of muon is muons.
What does muon mean?
noun
- 1
An unstable elementary particle in the lepton family, having similar properties to the electron but with a mass 207 times greater.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce muon?
- /ˈmjuːɒn/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-muon.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of muon
- muons plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is muon?
Muon appears about once in every 4 million words in written English, the 61,481st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Muon in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense an unstable elementary particle in the lepton family:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does muon come from?
Contraction of the earlier term mu-meson; the particle has now been recategorised as a lepton. Coined by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1951 in his book Elementary Particles.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).