- a minute portion, piece, fragment, or amount; a tiny or very small bit: a particle of dust; not a particle of supporting evidence.
- Physics.
- one of the extremely small constituents of matter, as an atom or nucleus.
- an elementary particle, quark, or gluon.
- a body in which the internal motion is negligible.
- a clause or article, as of a document.
- Grammar.
- (in some languages) one of the major form classes, or parts of speech, consisting of words that are neither nouns nor verbs, or of all uninflected words, or the like.
- such a word.
- a small word of functional or relational use, as an article, preposition, or conjunction, whether of a separate form class or not.
- a small piece of the Host given to each lay communicant in a Eucharistic service.
- an extremely small piece of matter; speck
- a very tiny amount; iota
- a function word, esp (in certain languages) a word belonging to an uninflected class having suprasegmental or grammatical function
- a common affix, such as re-, un-, or -ness
- a body with finite mass that can be treated as having negligible size, and internal structure
- See elementary particle
- a small piece broken off from the Host at Mass
- a section or clause of a document
