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(physics) A composite particle that comprises two or more quarks held together by the strong force and (consequently) can interact with other particles via said force; a meson or a baryon.
1996, J. R. Batley, “Measurements of B Hadron Lifetimes at LEP”, in Michael C. Birse, G. D. Lafferty, J. A. McGovern, editors, Hadron '95: The 6th International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy, World Scientific, page 48:
The weak decays of b hadrons are dominated by the spectator model process whereby the b quark decays to a c quark (or occasionally a u quark) with the emission of an external W, while the non-b antiquark or diquark acts simply as a passive spectator to the decay.
2005, D. B. Leinweber, A. W. Thomas, R. D. Young, “Hadron Structure and QCD: Effective Field Theory for Lattice Simulations”, in Alex C. Kalloniatis, Derek B. Leinweber, Anthony G. Williams, editors, Lattice Hadron Physics, Springer,, page 114:
One can use the lattice simulations, which do represent the rigorous consequences of non-perturbative QCD, as guidance for models of hadron structure.
2017, Syed Afsar Abbas, Group Theory in Particle, Nuclear, and Hadron Physics, Taylor & Francis (CRC Press / Chapman & Hall), page 204:
And hence colour, which was initially an ad hoc concept, later turned out to be an empirically confirmed reality of hadrons.
Usage notes
Aside from individual quarks (which are never observed by themselves) hadrons are the only particles that interact via the strong force. Thus, a possible (though potentially slightly misleading) definition is "composite particle that can interact via the strong force" - or indeed simply "composite particle", as all hadrons are composite and all known non-hadrons are not known to be composite. Either definition however will be non-marginally wrong if the existence of the hypothetical "glueballs", non-hadronic composite particles consisting of gluons, is confirmed.
The two categorisations hadron versus non-hadron and fermion versus boson together turn out to comprise a useful high-level categorisation of subatomic particles. (See the diagram above.)
(Missing from the diagram are quarks, the building blocks of hadrons. They are elementary, and therefore not themselves hadrons; they are, however, fermions. Thus, they would be classified, alongside leptons, as non-hadronic fermions.)
Quark on Wikipedia.Wikipedia 
