Two terms are used in referring to the mass of the quarks that make up protons: "current quark mass" refers to the mass of a quark by itself, while "constituent quark mass" refers to the current quark mass plus the mass of the gluon particle field surrounding the quark. These masses typically have very different values. As noted, most of a proton's mass comes from the gluons that bind the current quarks together, rather than from the quarks themselves. While gluons are inherently massless, they possess energy—to be more specific, quantum chromodynamics binding energy (QCBE)—and it is this that contributes so greatly to the overall mass of protons (see mass in special relativity). A proton has a mass of approximately 938 MeV/c2, of which the rest mass of its three valence quarks contributes only about 9.4 MeV/c2; much of the remainder can be attributed to the gluons' QCBE.