a hadron

You can never hold a bare quark, but you can hold a hadron, in fact you are made of them. A hadron is any particle built from quarks bound together by the strong force. The proton and neutron in every atomic nucleus are hadrons; so are the short-lived pions and kaons that spray out of particle collisions. The name comes from the Greek for 'thick' or 'stout,' reflecting that these were the heavy, strongly-interacting particles, as opposed to the light leptons that ignore the strong force entirely.

A hadron is a color-neutral bound state of quarks and gluons. The two classic families are baryons, made of three quarks (like the proton, uud, and the neutron, udd), and mesons, made of a quark and an antiquark (like the pion). Because a baryon contains three half-integer-spin quarks its total spin is half-integer, making baryons fermions; a meson's quark-antiquark pair gives integer total spin, making mesons bosons. Every hadron must be color-neutral overall, since the strong force confines color: the three colors of a baryon combine to 'white,' and a meson pairs a color with its anticolor. The word applies to the whole zoo, the Delta baryons, the rho and omega mesons, and heavier states containing charm and bottom quarks.

For decades baryons and mesons were the only known types, but QCD as a theory does not forbid other color-neutral combinations, and experiments have now confirmed exotic hadrons, tetraquarks (four quarks) and pentaquarks (five quarks), first seen clearly at the LHCb experiment. A subtle but important point: a hadron's mass is overwhelmingly the energy of the confined gluon field and the kinetic energy of the quarks, not the rest masses of the quarks themselves, so hadrons are dramatic demonstrations that mass is a form of energy.