As another non-expert which investigated this, there are two Higgs related things which give mass.<p>One of them, the Higgs mechanism, gives mass to bosons (force carrier particles) by direct interaction between the Higgs field and the bosons fields.<p>The other one gives mass to fermions (matter particles). This one is more related to the Dirac equation. There are basically two kinds of all fermions, a left kind and a right kind (chirality), and one electron for example constantly &quot;oscillates&quot; between these kinds. At each such oscillation it emits or absorbs a Higgs bosson.