1817 M. Keating Trav. I. 140 Uostalris is a place of general reception; but, a new establishment, resolved to be original throughout, assumes the name of Meson.

1824 J. R. Poinsett Notes on Mexico iv. 32 We entered the town..and drove through it to the meson.

1847 G. F. Ruxton Adventures Mexico & Rocky Mts. viii. 52 The meson was better than usual, being the stopping place of the diligencia to Fresnillo.

1861 E. B. Tylor Anahuac 209 The meson of Mexico is a lineal descendant of the Eastern Caravanserai... It consists of two courtyards, one surrounded by stabling and the other by miserable rooms for the travellers, who must cook their food themselves, or go elsewhere for it.

1910 A. Santleben Texas Pioneer 164 Meson means an inn or hostelry.

1955 Amer. Speech 30 258 Meson, an inn.

1881 B. G. Wilder in Science 19 Mar. 124/2 Meson, its derivatives and correlatives... It is desirable to designate this middle plane dividing the body into approximately equal right and left halves, or any line contained therein, by a word which is at once significant, short, and capable of inflection. Dr. Barclay proposed mesion..; but would it not be better to adopt the very term employed by the Greeks to signify the middle, meson, τό μέσον?

1883 B. G. Wilder & S. H. Gage Anat. Technol. 33 The Meson..is a plane passing lengthwise of the body and dividing the whole into approximately equal and similar right and left halves.

1889 A. H. Buck Ref. Handbk. Med. Sci. VIII. 536/1 The meson, mesal, or medial plane.

1904 Amer. Naturalist 38 158 There is a well developed maxillary valve, like two crescentic valves joined at the meson by their ends.

1949 Amer. Midland Naturalist 42 120 Tenth tergite divided into two lobes, widely separated on meson.

1972 Biotropica 4 149/2 In many cases further modifications occur where the clavus and corium are fused, the resultant ‘elytron’ meeting that of the other wing on the meson and thus giving the appearance of the wing of a beetle.

1939 H. J. Bhabha in Nature 18 Feb. 276/2 The name ‘mesotron’ has been suggested by Anderson and Neddermeyer..for the new particle found in cosmic radiation with a mass intermediate between that of the electron and proton. It is felt that the ‘tr’ in this word is redundant, since it does not belong to the Greek root ‘meso’ for middle; the ‘tr’ in neutron and electron belong, of course, to the roots ‘neutr’ and ‘electra’... It would therefore be more logical and also shorter to call the new particle a meson instead of a mesotron.

1948 Times 10 Mar. 4/7 Other scientists spoke of mesons as the ‘cosmic cement’ which is believed to hold together the nucleus of the atom.

1963 S. Tolansky Introd. Atomic Physics (ed. 5) xxiii. 391 They [sc. muons] were once called mu-mesons but it was recognised that they were not in fact mesons since they had different spins. They are fermions, not bosons, and now the name meson is reserved for bosons only.

1971 Sci. Amer. Oct. 42/3 Such high-energy cosmic ray collisions produce a shower of secondary particles, principally kaons (K mesons) and pions (pi mesons), which in turn decay spontaneously into muons.

1999 New Scientist 6 Feb. 26/2 Leading the charge are new accelerators in California and Japan called ‘B factories’, which will spawn B mesons by the tens of millions, starting this spring.

1966 Physics Today Dec. 21/1 Meson factories..will produce beams of nucleons and mesons ... By meson factory I mean a complete nuclear-physics installation based on an accelerator of 500–1000 MeV, which is capable of providing at least 100 microamperes of high quality external beam. All ancillary facilities for performing high precision experiments with the primary and secondary beams are included.

1978 Nature 19 Oct. 589/1 However, since the ‘meson factories’ in several other countries began operating a few years ago there has been a resurgence in studies of this fundamental interaction.

1995 Physical Rev. D. 51 3923 Spontaneous breaking of CPT is possible in string theory. We show that it can arise at a level within reach of experiments at meson factories currently being built or designed.