Names in physics often have whimsical origins...

For instance, the barn:

The etymology is clearly whimsical and jocular—the unit is said to be "as big as a barn" compared to the typical cross sections for nuclear reactions. During wartime research on the atomic bomb, American physicists who were bouncing neutrons off uranium nuclei described the uranium nucleus as “big as a barn.” Physicists working on the project adopted the name barn for a unit equal to 10-24 square centimetres, about the size of a uranium nucleus. Initially they hoped the American slang name would obscure any reference to the study of nuclear structure; eventually, the word became a standard unit in particle physics. [1]

The origin of the barn is described in the February 2006 issue of symmetry magazine.

Gell-Mann's own explanation:[8][9]

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

The phrase "three quarks" is a particularly good fit (as mentioned in the above quote), as at the time, there were only three known quarks, and since quarks appear in groups of three in baryons.