Here is the introduction:

Sub-atomic particles are either fermions or bosons. Fermions are the things you learned about in high school physics — electrons, protons, neutrons and so on — that share the quality that you can’t have two of them in the same space on an atom. Think of them as the billiard balls: they can be all over the table, but not in the same space at the same time, and where they go is determined by the size of the tables. Most of the fermions are comprised of other categories of sub-atomic particles, like quarks (which combine to form protons) and leptons, but the most important thing to know about them for the purposes of this discussion is that they are considered the matter particles.

Bosons are different. Bosons have the capacity to share space because they are more like a force than a thing in the way we normally think of “things” or “particles.” And since the normal understanding of the word particle is that it’s a small thing that has matter — the mote in the sun, rather than the light itself — perhaps a better way for lay people to think of bosons is as entities that have effects; they carry the forces (strong, weak, gravitational or electromagnetic) described by the Standard Model in physics, making them what physicists call force-carrying particles.

But if this whole particle-that-lacks-mass thing is still tripping you up, you don’t need to use that word in your own head; bosons lose nothing for our purposes by being thought of as entities, even if they are still technically particles, which is to say something really small of which other things are made. Some bosons have mass and some don’t. The Higgs boson has a very large mass for a sub-atomic particle, though of course it is still sub-atomic, which is to say tiny.    The Atlantic

Read further in the article to comprehend the Higgs boson.