particle

A very small piece of matter, a fragment; especially, the smallest possible part of something.

• 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.
• Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.

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.

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).

• In English there is no grammatical device to differentiate predicational judgments from nonpredicational descriptions. This distinction does cast a shadow on the grammatical sphere to some extent, but recognition of it must generally be mad
• Traditional grammar typically recognises a number of further categories: for example, in his Reference Book of Terms in Traditional Grammar for Language Students, Simpson (1982) posits two additional word-level categories which he refers to

A part of speech which cannot be inflected.

• 322. The parts of speech which are neither declined nor conjugated, are called by the general name of particles. 323. They are adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
• The Parts of Speech are the Noun (Substantive and Adjective), the Pronoun, the Verb, and the Particles (Adverb, Preposition, and Conjunction)[.]

In the Roman Catholic church, a crumb of consecrated bread; also the smaller breads used in the communion of the laity.

• the Sacred Particle

A little bit.

• "That doesn't make a particle of difference", replied Charlotte. "Not a particle."