Short answers, pulled from the story.
A subatomic particle is a particle smaller than an atom. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, it can be either a composite particle made of other particles, such as a proton or neutron, or an elementary particle that is not composed of other particles, such as an electron.
A composite particle, such as a proton or a neutron, is composed of other particles bound together, while an elementary particle, such as an electron, is not composed of anything smaller. Protons and neutrons are built from quarks, but the electron is one of the Standard Model's elementary particles.
Bosons have integer spin, while fermions have odd half-integer spin. Force carriers such as photons and gluons are bosons and lack rest mass, whereas fermions like quarks and leptons have rest mass and cannot overlap or combine.
Hadrons are composite particles containing five or fewer quarks bound together by gluons. The word hadron comes from Greek and was introduced in 1962 by the physicist Lev Okun, and hadrons divide into baryons with an odd number of quarks and mesons with an even number.
The Higgs boson was confirmed at CERN in 2012. It had been predicted by Peter Higgs in 1964 and is the only known elementary particle with spin zero.
The electron was the first subatomic particle to be identified, by J. J. Thomson in 1897. G. Johnstone Stoney had suggested the name electron in 1891, defining it as the minimum unit of electrical charge.
Except for the proton and the neutron, nearly all hadrons are unstable and decay in microseconds or less. Protons are not known to decay, neutrinos and antineutrinos do not decay, and the electron and positron are theoretically stable due to charge conservation.